Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general termspossible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that oursupreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment arethe religious attitude in the soul. I wish during this hour to call your attention to some of thepsychological peculiarities of such an attitude as this, or belief in an object which we cannot see.
All our attitudes, moral, practical, or emotional, as well as religious, are due to the "objects" of ourconsciousness, the things which we believe to exist, whether really or ideally, along withourselves. Such objects may be present to our senses, or they may be present only to our thought.
In either case they elicit from us a REACTION; and the reaction due to things of thought isnotoriously in many cases as strong as that due to sensible presences. It may be even stronger. Thememory of an insult may make us angrier than the insult did when we received it. We arefrequently more ashamed of our blunders afterwards than we were at the moment of making them;and in general our whole higher prudential and moral life is based on the fact that materialsensations actually present may have a weaker influence on our action than ideas of remoter facts.
The more concrete objects of most men's religion, the deities whom they worship, are known tothem only in idea. It has been vouchsafed, for example, to very few Christian believers to have hada sensible vision of their Saviour; though enough appearances of this sort are on record, by way ofmiraculous exception, to merit our attention later. The whole force of the Christian religion,therefore, so far as belief in the divine personages determines the prevalent attitude of the believer,is in general exerted by the instrumentality of pure ideas, of which nothing in the individual's pastexperience directly serves as a model.
But in addition to these ideas of the more concrete religious objects, religion is full of abstractobjects which prove to have an equal power. God's attributes as such, his holiness, his justice, hismercy, his absoluteness, his infinity, his omniscience, his tri-unity, the various mysteries of theredemptive process, the operation of the sacraments, etc., have proved fertile wells of inspiringmeditation for Christian believers.[21] We shall see later that the absence of definite sensible images is positively insisted on by the mystical authorities in all religions as the sine qua non of asuccessful orison, or contemplation of the higher divine truths. Such contemplations are expected(and abundantly verify the expectation, as we shall also see) to influence the believer's subsequentattitude very powerfully for good.
[21] Example: "I have had much comfort lately in meditating on the passages which show thepersonality of the Holy Ghost, and his distinctness from the Father and the Son. It is a subject thatrequires searching into to find out, but, when realized, gives one so much more true and lively asense of the fullness of the Godhead, and its work in us and to us, than when only thinking of theSpirit in its effect on us." Augustus Hare: Memorials, i. 244, Maria Hare to Lucy H. Hare.
Immanuel Kant held a curious doctrine about such objects of belief as God, the design ofcreation, the soul, its freedom, and the life hereafter. These things, he said, are properly not objectsof knowledge at all. Our conceptions always require a sense-content to work with, and as thewords soul," "God," "immortality," cover no distinctive sense-content whatever, it follows thattheoretically speaking they are words devoid of any significance. Yet strangely enough they have adefinite meaning FOR OUR PRACTICE. We can act AS IF there were a God; feel AS IF we werefree; consider Nature AS IF she were full of special designs; lay plans AS IF we were to beimmortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life. Ourfaith THAT these unintelligible objects actually exist proves thus to be a full equivalent inpraktischer Hinsicht, as Kant calls it, or from the point of view of our action, for a knowledge ofWHAT they might be, in case we were permitted positively to conceive them. So we have thestrange phenomenon, as Kant assures us, of a mind believing with all its strength in the realpresence of a set of things of no one of which it can form any notion whatsoever.
My object in thus recalling Kant's doctrine to your mind is not to express any opinion as to theaccuracy of this particularly uncouth part of his philosophy, but only to illustrate the characteristicof human nature which we are considering, by an example so classical in its exaggeration. Thesentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our object of belief that our whole life ispolarized through and through, so to speak, by its sense of the existence of the thing believed in,and yet that thing, for purpose of definite description, can hardly be said to be present to our mindat all. It is as if a bar of iron, without touch or sight, with no representative faculty whatever, mightnevertheless be strongly endowed with an inner capacity for magnetic feeling; and as if, throughthe various arousals of its magnetism by magnets coming and going in its neighborhood, it mightbe consciously determined to different attitudes and tendencies. Such a bar of iron could nevergive you an outward description of the agencies that had the power of stirring it so strongly; yet oftheir presence, and of their significance for its life, it would be intensely aware through every fibreof its being.
It is not only the Ideas of pure Reason as Kant styled them, that have this power of making usvitally feel presences that we are impotent articulately to describe. All sorts of higher abstractionsbring with them the same kind of impalpable appeal. Remember those passages from Emersonwhich I read at my last lecture. The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims,not only for such a transcendentalist writer, but for all of us, in a wider and higher universe ofabstract ideas, that lend it its significance. As time, space, and the ether soak through all things so (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance, justice, soak throughall things good, strong, significant, and just.
Such ideas, and others equally abstract, form the background for all our facts, the fountain-headof all the possibilities we conceive of. They give its "nature," as we call it, to every special thing.
Everything we know is "what" it is by sharing in the nature of one of these abstractions. We cannever look directly at them, for they are bodiless and featureless and footless, but we grasp allother things by their means, and in handling the real world we should be stricken with helplessnessin just so far forth as we might lose these mental objects, these adjectives and adverbs andpredicates and heads of classification and conception.
This absolute determinability of our mind by abstractions is one of the cardinal facts in ourhuman constitution. Polarizing and magnetizing us as they do, we turn towards them and fromthem, we seek them, hold them, hate them, bless them, just as if they were so many concretebeings. And beings they are, beings as real in the realm which they inhabit as the changing thingsof sense are in the realm of space.
Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common human feeling, that the doctrineof the reality of abstract objects has been known as the platonic theory of ideas ever since. AbstractBeauty, for example, is for Plato a perfectly definite individual being, of which the intellect isaware as of something additional to all the perishing beauties of the earth. "The true order ofgoing," he says, in the often quoted passage in his "Banquet," "is to use the beauties of earth assteps along which one mounts upwards for the sake of that other Beauty, going from one to two,and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fairnotions, until from fair notions, he arrives at the notion of absolute Beauty, and at last knows whatthe essence of Beauty is."[22] In our last lecture we had a glimpse of the way in which aplatonizing writer like Emerson may treat the abstract divineness of things, the moral structure ofthe universe, as a fact worthy of worship. In those various churches without a God which to-dayare spreading through the world under the name of ethical societies, we have a similar worship ofthe abstract divine, the moral law believed in as an ultimate object. "Science" in many minds isgenuinely taking the place of a religion. Where this is so, the scientist treats the "Laws of Nature"as objective facts to be revered. A brilliant school of interpretation of Greek mythology wouldhave it that in their origin the Greek gods were only half-metaphoric personifications of those greatspheres of abstract law and order into which the natural world falls apart--the sky-sphere, theocean-sphere, the earth-sphere, and the like; just as even now we may speak of the smile of themorning, the kiss of the breeze, or the bite of the cold, without really meaning that thesephenomena of nature actually wear a human face.[23]
[22] Symposium, Jowett, 1871, i. 527.
[23] Example: "Nature is always so interesting, under whatever aspect she shows herself, thatwhen it rains, I seem to see a beautiful woman weeping. She appears the more beautiful, the moreafflicted she is." B. de St. Pierre.
As regards the origin of the Greek gods, we need not at present seek an opinion. But the wholearray of our instances leads to a conclusion something like this: It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call"something there," more deep and more general than any of the special and particular "senses" bywhich the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed. If this were so,we might suppose the senses to waken our attitudes and conduct as they so habitually do, by firstexciting this sense of reality; but anything else, any idea, for example, that might similarly exciteit, would have that same prerogative of appearing real which objects of sense normally possess. Sofar as religious conceptions were able to touch this reality-feeling, they would be believed in inspite of criticism, even though they might be so vague and remote as to be almost unimaginable,even though they might be such non-entities in point of WHATNESS, as Kant makes the objectsof his moral theology to be.
The most curious proofs of the existence of such an undifferentiated sense of reality as this arefound in experiences of hallucination. It often happens that hallucination is imperfectlydeveloped: the person affected will feel a "presence" in the room,(an) definitely localized, facing inone particular way, real in the most emphatic sense of the word, often coming suddenly, and assuddenly gone; and yet neither seen, heard, touched, nor cognized in any of the usual "sensible"ways. Let me give you an example of this, before I pass to the objects with whose presencereligion is more peculiarly concerned.
An intimate friend of mine, one of the keenest intellects I know, has had several experiences ofthis sort. He writes as follows in response to my inquiries:--<59>
"I have several times within the past few years felt the so-called 'consciousness of a presence.'
The experiences which I have in mind are clearly distinguishable from another kind of experiencewhich I have had very frequently, and which I fancy many persons would also call the'consciousness of a presence.' But the difference for me between the two sets of experience is asgreat as the difference between feeling a slight warmth originating I know not where, and standingin the midst of a conflagration with all the ordinary senses alert.
"It was about September, 1884, when I had the first experience. On the previous night I had had,after getting into bed at my rooms in College, a vivid tactile hallucination of being grasped by thearm, which made me get up and search the room for an intruder; but the sense of presence properlyso called came on the next night. After I had got into bed and blown out the candle, I lay awakeawhile thinking on the previous night's experience, when suddenly I FELT something come intothe room and stay close to my bed. It remained only a minute or two. I did not recognize it by anyordinary sense and yet there was a horribly unpleasant 'sensation' connected with it. It stirredsomething more at the roots of my being than any ordinary perception. The feeling had somethingof the quality of a very large tearing vital pain spreading chiefly over the chest, but within theorganism--and yet the feeling was not PAIN so much as ABHORRENCE. At all events, somethingwas present with me, and I knew its presence far more surely than I have ever known the presenceof any fleshly living creature. I was conscious of its departure as of its coming: an almostinstantaneously swift going through the door, and the 'horrible sensation' disappeared.
"On the third night when I retired my mind absorbed in lectures which I was preparing,andIwasstillabsorbedinthesewhenIbec(was) ameawareofthea(some) ctual presence (thoughnot of the COMING) of the thing that was there the night before, and of the 'horrible sensation.' Ithen mentally concentrated all my effort to charge this 'thing,' if it was evil to depart, if it was NOT evil, to tell me who or what it was, and if it could not explain itself, to go, and that I would compelit <60> to go. It went as on the previous night, and my body quickly recovered its normal state.
"On two other occasions in my life I have had precisely the same 'horrible sensation.' Once itlasted a full quarter of an hour. In all three instances the certainty that there in outward space therestood SOMETHING was indescribably STRONGER than the ordinary certainty of companionshipwhen we are in the close presence of ordinary living people. The something seemed close to me,and intensely more real than any ordinary perception. Although I felt it to be like unto myself so tospeak, or finite, small, and distressful, as it were, I didn't recognize it as any individual being orperson."Of course such an experience as this does not connect itself with the religious sphere. Yet it mayupon occasion do so; and the same correspondent informs me that at more than one otherconjuncture he had the sense of presence developed with equal intensity and abruptness, only thenit was filled with a quality of joy.
"There was not a mere consciousness of something there, but fused in the central happiness of it,a startling awareness of some ineffable good. Not vague either, not like the emotional effect ofsome poem, or scene, or blossom, of music, but the sure knowledge of the close presence of a sortof mighty person, and after it went, the memory persisted as the one perception of reality.
Everything else might be a dream, but not that."My friend, as it oddly happens, does not interpret these latter experiences theistically, assignifying the presence of God. But it would clearly not have been unnatural to interpret them as arevelation of the deity's existence. When we reach the subject of mysticism, we shall have muchmore to say upon this head.
Lest the oddity of these phenomena should disconcert you, I will venture to read you a couple ofsimilar narratives, much shorter, merely to show that we are dealing with a well-marked naturalkind of fact. In the first case, which I <61> take from the Journal of the Society for PsychicalResearch, the sense of presence developed in a few moments into a distinctly visualizedhallucination--but I leave that part of the story out.
"I had read," the narrator says, "some twenty minutes or so, was thoroughly absorbed in thebook, my mind was perfectly quiet, and for the time being my friends were quite forgotten, whensuddenly without a moment's warning my whole being seemed roused to the highest state oftension or aliveness, and I was aware, with an intenseness not easily imagined by those who hadnever experienced it, that another being or presence was not only in the room, but quite close tome. I put my book down, and although my excitement was great, I felt quite collected, and notconscious of any sense of fear. Without changing my position, and looking straight at the fire, Iknew somehow that my friend A. H. was standing at my left elbow but so far behind me as to behidden by the armchair in which I was leaning back. Moving my eyes round slightly withoutotherwise changing my position, the lower portion of one leg became visible, and I instantlyrecognized the gray-blue material of trousers he often wore, but the stuff appeared semitransparent,reminding me of tobacco smoke in consistency,"[24]-- and hereupon the visual hallucination came.
[24] Journal of the S. P. R., February, 1895, p. 26.
Another informant writes:-"Quite early in the night I was awakened. . . . I felt as if I had been aroused intentionally, and atfirst thought some one was breaking into the house. . . . I then turned on my side to go to sleepagain, and immediately felt a consciousness of a presence in the room, and singular to state, it wasnot the consciousness of a live person, but of a spiritual presence. This may provoke a smile, but Ican only tell you the facts as they occurred to me. I do not know how to better describe mysensations than by simply stating that I felt a consciousness of a spiritual presence. . . . I felt also atthe same time a strong feeling of superstitious dread, as if something strange and fearful wereabout to happen."[25]
[25] E. Gurney: Phantasms of the Living, i. 384.
Professor Flournoy of Geneva gives me the following testimony of a friend of his, a lady, whohas the gift of automatic or involuntary writing:-"Whenever I practice automatic writing, what makes me feel that it is not due to a subconsciousself is the feeling I always have of a foreign presence, external to my body. It is sometimes sodefinitely characterized that I could point to its exact position. This impression of presence isimpossible to describe. It varies in intensity and clearness according to the personality from whomthe writing professes to come. If it is some one whom I love, I feel it immediately, before anywriting has come. My heart seems to recognize it."In an earlier book of mine I have cited at full length a curious case of presence felt by a blindman. The presence was that of the figure of a gray-bearded man dressed in a pepper and salt suit,squeezing himself under the crack of the door and moving across the floor of the room towards asofa. The blind subject of this quasi-hallucination is an exceptionally intelligent reporter. He isentirely without internal visual imagery and cannot represent light or colors to himself, and ispositive that his other senses, hearing, etc., were not involved in this false perception. It seems tohave been an abstract conception rather, with the feelings of reality and spatial outwardnessdirectly attached to it--in other words, a fully objectified and exteriorized IDEA.
Such cases, taken along with others which would be too tedious for quotation, seem sufficientlyto prove the existence in our mental machinery of a sense of present reality more diffused andgeneral than that which our special senses yield. For the psychologists the tracing of the organicseat of such a feeling would form a pretty problem--nothing could be more natural than to connectit with the muscular sense, with the feeling that our muscles were innervating themselves foraction. Whatsoever thus innervated our activity, or "made our flesh creep"--our senses are what doso oftenest--might then appear real and present, even though it were but an abstract idea. But withsuch vague conjectures we have no concern at present, for our interest lies with the faculty ratherthan with its organic seat.
Like all positive affections of consciousness, the sense of reality has its negative counterpart inthe shape of a feeling of unreality by which persons may be haunted, and of which one sometimeshears complaint:-"When I reflect on the fact that I have made my appearance by accident upon a globe itselfwhirled through space as the sport of the catastrophes of the heavens," says Madame Ackermann; "when I see myself surrounded by beings as ephemeral and incomprehensible as I am myself, andall excitedly pursuing pure chimeras, I experience a strange feeling of being in a dream. It seems tome as if I have loved and suffered and that erelong I shall die, in a dream. My last word will be, 'Ihave been dreaming.'"[26]
[26] Pensees d'un Solitaire, p. 66.
In another lecture we shall see how in morbid melancholy this sense of the unreality of thingsmay become a carking pain, and even lead to suicide.
We may now lay it down as certain that in the distinctively religious sphere of experience, manypersons (how many we cannot tell) possess the objects of their belief, not in the form of mereconceptions which their intellect accepts as true, but rather in the form of quasi-sensible realitiesdirectly apprehended. As his sense of the real presence of these objects fluctuates, so the believeralternates between warmth and coldness in his faith. Other examples will bring this home to onebetter than abstract description, so I proceed immediately to cite some. The first example is anegative one, deploring the loss of the sense in question. I have extracted it from an account givenme by a scientific man of my acquaintance, of his religious life. It seems to me to show clearly thatthe feeling of reality may be something more like a sensation than an intellectual operationproperly so-called.
"Between twenty and thirty I gradually became more and more agnostic and irreligious, yet Icannot say that I ever lost that 'indefinite consciousness' which Herbert Spencer describes so well,of an Absolute Reality behind phenomena. For me this Reality was not the pure Unknowable ofSpencer's philosophy, for although I had ceased my childish prayers to God, and never prayed toIT in a formal manner, yet my more recent experience shows me to have been in a relation to ITwhich practically was the same thing as prayer. Whenever I had any trouble, especially when I hadconflict with other people, either domestically or in the way of business, or when I was depressedin spirits or anxious about affairs, I now recognize that I used to fall back for support upon thiscurious relation I felt myself to be in to this fundamental cosmical IT. It was on my side, or I wason Its side, however you please to term it, in the particular trouble, and it always strengthened meand seemed to give me endless vitality to feel its underlying and supporting presence. In fact, itwas an unfailing fountain of living justice, truth, and strength, to which I instinctively turned attimes of weakness, and it always brought me out. I know now that it was a personal relation I wasin to it, because of late years the power of communicating with it has left me, and I am consciousof a perfectly definite loss. I used never to fail to find it when I turned to it. Then came a set ofyears when sometimes I found it, and then again I would be wholly unable to make connectionwith it. I remember many occasions on which at night in bed, I would be unable to get to sleep onaccount of worry. I turned this way and that in the darkness, and groped mentally for the familiarsense of that higher mind of my mind which had always seemed to be close at hand as it were,closing the passage, and yielding support, but there was no electric current. A blank was thereinstead of IT: I couldn't find anything. Now, at the age of nearly fifty, my power of getting intoconnection with it has entirely left me; and I have to confess that a great help has gone out of mylife. Life has become curiously dead and <65> indifferent; and I can now see that my oldexperience was probably exactly the same thing as the prayers of the orthodox, only I did not call them by that name. What I have spoken of as 'It' was practically not Spencer's Unknowable, butjust my own instinctive and individual God, whom I relied upon for higher sympathy, but whomsomehow I have lost."Nothing is more common in the pages of religious biography than the way in which seasons oflively and of difficult faith are described as alternating. Probably every religious person has therecollection of particular crisis in which a directer vision of the truth, a direct perception, perhaps,of a living God's existence, swept in and overwhelmed the languor of the more ordinary belief. InJames Russell Lowell's correspondence there is a brief memorandum of an experience of thiskind:-"I had a revelation last Friday evening. I was at Mary's, and happening to say something of thepresence of spirits (of whom, I said, I was often dimly aware), Mr. Putnam entered into anargument with me on spiritual matters. As I was speaking, the whole system rose up before me likea vague destiny looming from the Abyss. I never before so clearly felt the Spirit of God in me andaround rue. The whole room seemed to me full of God. The air seemed to waver to and fro withthe presence of Something I knew not what. I spoke with the calmness and clearness of a prophet. Icannot tell you what this revelation was. I have not yet studied it enough. But I shall perfect it oneday, and then you shall hear it and acknowledge its grandeur."[27]
[27] Letters of Lowell, i. 75.
<66> Here is a longer and more developed experience from a manuscript communication by aclergyman--I take it from Starbuck's manuscript collection:-"I remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hill-top, where my soul opened out, as itwere, into the Infinite, and there was a rushing together of the two worlds, the inner and the outer.
It was deep calling unto deep--the deep that my own struggle had opened up within beinganswered by the unfathomable deep without, reaching beyond the stars. I stood alone with Himwho had made me, and all the beauty of the world, and love, and sorrow, and even temptation. Idid not seek Him, but felt the perfect unison of my spirit with His. The ordinary sense of thingsaround me faded. For the moment nothing but an ineffable joy and exultation remained. It isimpossible fully to describe the experience. It was like the effect of some great orchestra when allthe separate notes have melted into one swelling harmony that leaves the listener conscious ofnothing save that his soul is being wafted upwards, and almost bursting with its own emotion. Theperfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presencethat was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that HE wasthere than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two.
"My highest faith in God and truest idea of him were then born in me. I have stood upon theMount of Vision since, and felt the Eternal round about me. But never since has there come quitethe same stirring of the heart. Then, if ever, I believe, I stood face to face with God, and was bornanew of his spirit. There was, as I recall it, no sudden change of thought or of belief, except thatmy early crude conception, had, as it were burst into flower. There was no destruction of the old,but a rapid, wonderful unfolding. Since that time no discussion that I have heard of the proofs ofGod's existence has been able to shake my faith. Having once felt the presence of God's spirit, I have never lost it again for long. My most assuring evidence of his existence is deeply rooted inthat hour of vision in the memory of that supreme experience, and in the conviction, gained fromreading and reflection, that something the same has come to all who have found God. I am awarethat it may justly be called mystical. I am not enough acquainted with philosophy to defend it fromthat or any other charge. I feel that in writing of it I have overlaid it with words rather than put itclearly to your thought. But, such as it is, I have described it as carefully as I now am able to do."Here is another document, even more definite in character, which, the writer being a Swiss, Itranslate from the French original.[28]
[28] I borrow it, with Professor Flournoy's permission, from his rich collection of psychologicaldocuments.
"I was in perfect health: we were on our sixth day of tramping, and in good training. We hadcome the day before from Sixt to Trient by Buet. I felt neither fatigue, hunger, nor thirst, and mystate of mind was equally healthy. I had had at Forlaz good news from home; I was subject to noanxiety, either near or remote, for we had a good guide, and there was not a shadow of uncertaintyabout the road we should follow. I can best describe the condition in which I was by calling it astate of equilibrium. When all at once I experienced a feeling of being raised above myself, I feltthe presence of God--I tell of the thing just as I was conscious of it--as if his goodness and hispower were penetrating me altogether. The throb of emotion was so violent that I could barely tellthe boys to pass on and not wait for me. I then sat down on a stone, unable to stand any longer, andmy eyes overflowed with tears. I thanked God that in the course of my life he had taught me toknow him, that he sustained my life and took pity both on the insignificant creature and on thesinner that I was. I begged him ardently that my life might be consecrated to the doing of his will. Ifelt his reply, which was that I should do his will from day to day in humility and poverty, leavinghim, the Almighty God, to be judge of whether I should some time be called to bear witness moreconspicuously. Then, slowly, the ecstasy left my heart; that is, I felt that God had withdrawn thecommunion which he had granted, and I was able to walk on, but very slowly, so strongly was Istill possessed by the interior emotion. Besides, I had wept uninterruptedly for several minutes, myeyes were swollen, and I did not wish my companions to see me. The state of ecstasy may havelasted four or five minutes, although it seemed at the time to last much longer. My comradeswaited for me ten minutes at the cross of Barine, but I took about twenty-five or thirty minutes tojoin them, for as well as I can remember, they said that I had kept them back for about half anhour. The impression had been so profound that in climbing slowly the slope I asked myself if itwere possible that Moses on Sinai could have had a more intimate communication with God. Ithink it well to add that in this ecstasy of mine God had neither form, color, odor, nor taste;moreover, that the feeling of his presence was accompanied with no determinate localization. Itwas rather as if my personality had been transformed by the presence of a SPIRITUAL SPIRIT.
But the more I seek words to express this intimate intercourse, the more I feel the impossibility ofdescribing the thing by any of our usual images. At bottom the expression most apt to render whatI felt is this: God was present, though invisible; he fell under no one of my senses, yet myconsciousness perceived him."The adjective "mystical" is technically applied, most often. to states that are of brief duration. Ofcourse such hours of rapture as the last two persons describe are mystical experiences, of which ina later lecture I shall have much to say. Meanwhile here is the abridged record of another mysticalor semi-mystical experience, in a mind evidently framed by nature for ardent piety. I owe it toStarbuck's collection. The lady who gives the account is the daughter of a man well known in histime as a writer against Christianity. The suddenness of her conversion shows well how native thesense of God's presence must be to certain minds. She relates that she was brought up in entireignorance of Christian doctrine, but, when in Germany, after being talked to by Christian friends,she read the Bible and prayed, and finally the plan of salvation flashed upon her like a stream oflight.
<69> "To this day," she writes, "I cannot understand dallying with religion and the commands ofGod. The very instant I heard my Father's cry calling unto me, my heart bounded in recognition.
I ran, I stretched forth my arms, I cried aloud, 'Here, here I am, my Father.' Oh, happy child,what should I do? 'Love me,' answered my God. 'I do, I do,' I cried passionately. 'Come unto me,'
called my Father. 'I will,' my heart panted. Did I stop to ask a single question? Not one. It neveroccurred to me to ask whether I was good enough, or to hesitate over my unfitness, or to find outwhat I thought of his church, or . . . to wait until I should be satisfied. Satisfied! I was satisfied.
Had I not found my God and my Father? Did he not love me? Had he not called me? Was there nota Church into which I might enter? . . . Since then I have had direct answers to prayer--sosignificant as to be almost like talking with God and hearing his answer. The idea of God's realityhas never left me for one moment."Here is still another case, the writer being a man aged twenty-seven, in which the experience,probably almost as characteristic, is less vividly described:-"I have on a number of occasions felt that I had enjoyed a period of intimate communion withthe divine. These meetings came unasked and unexpected, and seemed to consist merely in thetemporary obliteration of the conventionalities which usually surround and cover my life. . . . Onceit was when from the summit of a high mountain I looked over a gashed and corrugated landscapeextending to a long convex of ocean that ascended to the horizon, and again from the same pointwhen I could see nothing beneath me but a boundless expanse of white cloud, on the blown surfaceof which a few high peaks, including the one I was on, seemed plunging about as if they weredragging their anchors.
What I felt on these occasions was a temporary loss of my own identity, accompanied by anillumination which revealed to me a deeper significance than I had been wont to attach to life. It isin this that I find my justification for saying that I have enjoyed communication with God. Ofcourse the absence of such a being as this would be chaos. I cannot conceive of life without itspresence."Of the more habitual and so to speak chronic sense of God's presence the following sample fromProfessor Starbuck's manuscript collection may serve to give an idea. It is from a man aged forty-nine--probably thousands of unpretending Christians would write an almost identical account.
"God is more real to me than any thought or thing or person. I feel his presence positively, andthe more as I live in closer harmony with his laws as written in my body and mind. I feel him in the sunshine or rain; and awe mingled with a delicious restfulness most nearly describes myfeelings. I talk to him as to a companion in prayer and praise, and our communion is delightful. Heanswers me again and again, often in words so clearly spoken that it seems my outer ear must havecarried the tone, but generally in strong mental impressions. Usually a text of Scripture, unfoldingsome new view of him and his love for me, and care for my safety. I could give hundreds ofinstances, in school matters, social problems, financial difficulties, etc. That he is mine and I amhis never leaves me, it is an abiding joy. Without it life would be a blank, a desert, a shoreless,trackless waste."I subjoin some more examples from writers of different ages and sexes. They are also fromProfessor Starbuck's collection, and their number might be greatly multiplied. The first is from aman twenty-seven years old:-"God is quite real to me. I talk to him and often get answers. Thoughts sudden and distinct fromany I have been entertaining come to my mind after asking God for his direction. Something over ayear ago I was for some weeks in the direst perplexity. When the trouble first appeared before me Iwas dazed, but before long (two or three hours) I could hear distinctly a passage of Scripture: 'Mygrace is sufficient for thee.' Every time my thoughts turned to the trouble I could hear thisquotation. I don't think I ever doubted the existence of God, or had him drop out of myconsciousness. God has frequently stepped into my affairs very perceptibly, and I feel that hedirects many little details all the time. But on two or three occasions he has ordered ways for mevery contrary to my ambitions and plans."Another statement (none the less valuable psychologically for being so decidedly childish) is thatof a boy of seventeen:-"Sometimes as I go to church, I sit down, join in the service, and before I go out I feel as if Godwas with me, right side of me, singing and reading the Psalms with me. . . . And then again I feelas if I could sit beside him, and put my arms around him, kiss him, etc. When I am taking HolyCommunion at the altar, I try to get with him and generally feel his presence."I let a few other cases follow at random:-"God surrounds me like the physical atmosphere. He is closer to me than my own breath. In himliterally I live and move and have my being."-"There are times when I seem to stand in his very presence, to talk with him. Answers to prayerhave come, sometimes direct and overwhelming in their revelation of his presence and powers.
There are times when God seems far off, but this is always my own fault."-"I have the sense of a presence, strong, and at the same time soothing, which hovers over me.
Sometimes it seems to enwrap me with sustaining arms."Such is the human ontological imagination, and such is the convincingness of what it brings tobirth. Unpicturable beings are realized, and realized with an intensity almost like that of anhallucination. They determine our vital attitude as decisively as the vital attitude of lovers isdetermined by the habitual sense, by which each is haunted, of the other being in the world. Alover has notoriously this sense of the continuous being of his idol, even when his attention isaddressed to other matters and he no longer represents her features. He cannot forget her; sheuninterruptedly affects him through and through. I spoke of the convincingness of these feelings of reality, and I must dwell a moment longer on that point. They are as convincing to those who havethem as any direct sensible experiences can be, and they are, as a rule, much more convincing thanresults established by mere logic ever are. One may indeed be entirely without them; probablymore than one of you here present is without them in any marked degree; but if you do have them,and have them at all strongly, the probability is that you cannot help regarding them as genuineperceptions of truth, as revelations of a kind of reality which no adverse argument, howeverunanswerable by you in words, can expel from your belief.
The opinion opposed to mysticism in philosophy is sometimes spoken of as RATIONALISM.
Rationalism insists that all our beliefs ought ultimately to find for themselves articulate grounds.
Such grounds, for rationalism, must consist of four things: (1) definitely statable abstractprinciples; (2) definite facts of sensation; (3) definite hypotheses based on such facts; and (4)definite inferences logically drawn. Vague impressions of something indefinable have no place inthe rationalistic system, which on its positive side is surely a splendid intellectual tendency, for notonly are all our philosophies fruits of it, but physical science (amongst other good things) is itsresult.
Nevertheless, if we look on man's whole mental life as it exists, on the life of men that lies inthem apart from their learning and science, and that they inwardly and privately follow, we have toconfess that the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial. It is thepart that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, andchop logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same,if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions. If you have intuitions at all, they come froma deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which rationalism inhabits. Your wholesubconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared thepremises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in youabsolutely KNOWS that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk,however clever, that may contradict it. This inferiority of the rationalistic level in founding beliefis just as manifest when rationalism argues for religion as when it argues against it. That vastliterature of proofs of God's existence drawn from the order of nature, which a century ago seemedso overwhelmingly convincing, to-day does little more than gather dust in libraries, for the simplereason that our generation has ceased to believe in the kind of God it argued for. Whatever sort ofa being God may be, we KNOW to-day that he is nevermore that mere external inventor of"contrivances" intended to make manifest his "glory" in which our great-grandfathers took suchsatisfaction, though just how we know this we cannot possibly make clear by words either toothers or to ourselves. I defy any of you here fully to account for your persuasion that if a Godexist he must be a more cosmic and tragic personage than that Being.
The truth is that in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for usonly when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the sameconclusion. Then, indeed, our intuitions and our reason work together, and great world-rulingsystems, like that of the Buddhist or of the Catholic philosophy, may grow up. Our impulsivebelief is here always what sets up the original body of truth, and our articulately verbalizedphilosophy is but its showy translation into formulas. The unreasoned and immediate assurance isthe deep thing in us, the reasoned argument is but a surface exhibition. Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow. If a person feels the presence of a living God after the fashion shown by myquotations, your critical arguments, be they never so superior, will vainly set themselves to changehis faith.
Please observe, however, that I do not yet say that it is BETTER that the subconscious and non-rational should thus hold primacy in the religious realm. I confine myself to simply pointing outthat they do so hold it as a matter of fact.
So much for our sense of the reality of the religious objects. Let me now say a brief word moreabout the attitudes they characteristically awaken.
We have already agreed that they are SOLEMN; and we have seen reason to think that the mostdistinctive of them is the sort of joy which may result in extreme cases from absolute self-surrender. The sense of the kind of object to which the surrender is made has much to do withdetermining the precise complexion of the joy; and the whole phenomenon is more complex thanany simple formula allows. In the literature of the subject, sadness and gladness have each beenemphasized in turn. The ancient saying that the first maker of the Gods was fear receivesvoluminous corroboration from every age of religious history; but none the less does religioushistory show the part which joy has evermore tended to play. Sometimes the joy has been primary;sometimes secondary, being the gladness of deliverance from the fear. This latter state of things,being the more complex, is also the more complete; and as we proceed, I think we shall haveabundant reason for refusing to leave out either the sadness or the gladness, if we look at religionwith the breadth of view which it demands. Stated in the completest possible terms, a man'sreligion involves both moods of contraction and moods of expansion of his being. But thequantitative mixture and order of these moods vary so much from one age of the world, from onesystem of thought, and from one individual to another, that you may insist either on the dread andthe submission, or on the peace and the freedom as the essence of the matter, and still remainmaterially within the limits of the truth. The constitutionally sombre and the constitutionallysanguine onlooker are bound to emphasize opposite aspects of what lies before their eyes.
The constitutionally sombre religious person makes even of his religious peace a very soberthing. Danger still hovers in the air about it. Flexion and contraction are not wholly checked. Itwere sparrowlike and childish after our deliverance to explode into twittering laughter and caper-cutting, and utterly to forget the imminent hawk on bough. Lie low, rather, lie low; for you are inthe hands of a living God. In the Book of Job, for example, the impotence of man and theomnipotence of God is the exclusive burden of its author's mind. "It is as high as heaven; whatcanst thou do?--deeper than hell; what canst thou know?" There is an astringent relish about thetruth of this conviction which some men can feel, and which for them is as near an approach as canbe made to the feeling of religious joy.
"In Job," says that coldly truthful writer, the author of Mark Rutherford, "God reminds us thatman is not the measure of his creation. The world is immense, constructed on no plan or theorywhich the intellect of man can grasp. It is TRANSCENDENT everywhere. This is the burden ofevery verse, and is the secret if there be one, of the poem. Sufficient or insufficient, there isnothing more. . . . God is great, we know not his ways. He takes from us all we have, but yet if wepossess our souls in patience, we MAY pass the valley of the shadow, and come out in sunlight again. We may or we may not! . . . What more have we to say now than God said from thewhirlwind over two thousand five hundred years ago?"[29]
[29] Mark Rutherford's Deliverance, London, 1885, pp. 196, 198.
If we turn to the sanguine onlooker, on the other hand, we find that deliverance is felt asincomplete unless the burden be altogether overcome and the danger forgotten. Such onlookersgive us definitions that seem to the sombre minds of whom we have just been speaking to leaveout all the solemnity that makes religious peace so different from merely animal joys. In theopinion of some writers an attitude might be called religious, though no touch were left in it ofsacrifice or submission, no tendency to flexion, no bowing of the head. Any "habitual andregulated admiration," says Professor J. R. Seeley,[30] "is worthy to be called a religion"; andaccordingly he thinks that our Music, our Science, and our so-called "Civilization," as these thingsare now organized and admiringly believed in, form the more genuine religions of our time.
Certainly the unhesitating and unreasoning way in which we feel that we must inflict ourcivilization upon "lower" races, by means of Hotchkiss guns, etc., reminds one of nothing so muchas of the early spirit of Islam spreading its religion by the sword.
[30] In his book (too little read, I fear), Natural Religion, 3d edition, Boston, 1886, pp. 91, 122.
In my last lecture I quoted to you the ultra-radical opinion of Mr. Havelock Ellis, that laughter ofany sort may be considered a religious exercise, for it bears witness to the soul's emancipation. Iquoted this opinion in order to deny its adequacy. But we must now settle our scores morecarefully with this whole optimistic way of thinking. It is far too complex to be decided off-hand. Ipropose accordingly that we make of religious optimism the theme of the next two lectures.