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Lecture XIX
OTHER CHARACTERISTICS
We have wound our way back, after our excursion through mysticism
and philosophy, to where we were before: the uses of religion,
its uses to the individual who has it, and the uses of the
individual himself to the world, are the best arguments that
truth is in it. We return to the empirical philosophy: the true
is what works well, even though the qualification "on the whole"
may always have to be added. In this lecture we must revert to
description again, and finish our picture of the religious
consciousness by a word about some of its other characteristic
elements. Then, in a final lecture, we shall be free to make a
general review and draw our independent conclusions.
The first point I will speak of is the part which the aesthetic
life plays in determining one's choice of a religion. Men, I
said awhile ago, involuntarily intellectualize their religious
experience. They need formulas, just as they need fellowship in
worship. I spoke, therefore, too contemptuously of the pragmatic
uselessness of the famous scholastic list of attributes of the
deity, for they have one use which I neglected to consider. The
eloquent passage in which Newman enumerates them [301] puts us on
the track of it. Intoning them as he would intone a cathedral
service, he shows how high is their aesthetic value. It enriches
our bare piety to carry these exalted and mysterious verbal
additions just as it enriches a church to have an organ and old
brasses, marbles and frescoes and stained windows. Epithets lend
an atmosphere and overtones to our devotion. They are like a
hymn of praise and service of glory, and may sound the more
sublime for being incomprehensible. Minds like Newman's [302]
grow as jealous of their credit as heathen priests are of that of
the jewelry and ornaments that blaze upon their idols.
Among the buildings-out of religion which the mind spontaneously
indulges in, the aesthetic motive must never be forgotten. I
promised to say nothing of ecclesiastical systems in these
lectures. I may be allowed, however, to put in a word at this
point on the way in which their satisfaction of certain aesthetic
needs contributes to their hold on human nature. Although some
persons aim most at intellectual purity and simplification, for
others RICHNESS is the supreme imaginative requirement.[303] When
one's mind is strongly of this type, an individual religion will
hardly serve the purpose. The inner need is rather of something
institutional and complex, majestic in the hierarchic
interrelatedness of its parts, with authority descending from
stage to stage, and at every stage objects for adjectives of
mystery and splendor, derived in the last resort from the Godhead
who is the fountain and culmination of the system. One feels
then as if in presence of some vast incrusted work of jewelry or
architecture; one hears the multitudinous liturgical appeal; one
gets the honorific vibration coming from every quarter. Compared
with such a noble complexity, in which ascending and descending
movements seem in no way to jar upon stability, in which no
single item, however humble, is insignificant, because so many
august institutions hold it in its place, how flat does
evangelical Protestantism appear, how bare the atmosphere of
those isolated religious lives whose boast it is that "man in the
bush with God may meet."[304] What a pulverization and leveling
of what a gloriously piled-up structure! To an imagination used
to the perspectives of dignity and glory, the naked gospel scheme
seems to offer an almshouse for a palace.
[304] In Newman's Lectures on Justification Lecture VIII.
Section 6, there is a splendid passage expressive of this
aesthetic way of feeling the Christian scheme. It is
unfortunately too long to quote.
It is much like the patriotic sentiment of those brought up in
ancient empires. How many emotions must be frustrated of their
object, when one gives up the titles of dignity, the crimson
lights and blare of brass, the gold embroidery, the plumed
troops, the fear and trembling, and puts up with a president in a
black coat who shakes hands with you, and comes, it may be, from
a "home" upon a veldt or prairie with one sitting-room and a
Bible on its centre-table. It pauperizes the monarchical
imagination!
The strength of these aesthetic sentiments makes it rigorously
impossible, it seems to me, that Protestantism, however superior
in spiritual profundity it may be to Catholicism, should at the
present day succeed in making many converts from the more
venerable ecclesiasticism. The latter offers a so much richer
pasturage and shade to the fancy, has so many cells with so many
different kinds of honey, is so indulgent in its multiform
appeals to human nature, that Protestantism will always show to
Catholic eyes the almshouse physiognomy. The bitter negativity
of it is to the Catholic mind incomprehensible. To intellectual
Catholics many of the antiquated beliefs and practices to which
the Church gives countenance are, if taken literally, as childish
as they are to Protestants. But they are childish in the
pleasing sense of "childlike"--innocent and amiable, and worthy
to be smiled on in consideration of the undeveloped condition of
the dear people's intellects. To the Protestant, on the
contrary, they are childish in the sense of being idiotic
falsehoods. He must stamp out their delicate and lovable
redundancy, leaving the Catholic to shudder at his literalness.
He appears to the latter as morose as if he were some hard-eyed,
numb, monotonous kind of reptile. The two will never understand
each other--their centres of emotional energy are too different.
Rigorous truth and human nature's intricacies are always in need
of a mutual interpreter.[305] So much for the aesthetic
diversities in the religious consciousness.
In most books on religion, three things are represented as its
most essential elements. These are Sacrifice, Confession, and
Prayer. I must say a word in turn of each of these elements,
though briefly. First of Sacrifice.
Sacrifices to gods are omnipresent in primeval worship; but, as
cults have grown refined, burnt offerings and the blood of
he-goats have been superseded by sacrifices more spiritual in
their nature. Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism get along without
ritual sacrifice; so does Christianity, save in so far as the
notion is preserved in transfigured form in the mystery of
Christ's atonement. These religions substitute offerings of the
heart, renunciations of the inner self, for all those vain
oblations. In the ascetic practices which Islam, Buddhism, and
the older Christianity encourage we see how indestructible is the
idea that sacrifice of some sort is a religious exercise. In
lecturing on asceticism I spoke of its significance as symbolic
of the sacrifices which life, whenever it is taken strenuously,
calls for.[306] But, as I said my say about those, and as these
lectures expressly avoid earlier religious usages and questions
of derivation, I will pass from the subject of Sacrifice
altogether and turn to that of Confession.
In regard to Confession I will also be most brief, saying my word
about it psychologically, not historically. Not nearly as
widespread as sacrifice, it corresponds to a more inward and
moral stage of sentiment. It is part of the general system of
purgation and cleansing which one feels one's self in need of, in
order to be in right relations to one's deity. For him who
confesses, shams are over and realities have begun; he has
exteriorized his rottenness. If he has not actually got rid of
it, he at least no longer smears it over with a hypocritical show
of virtue--he lives at least upon a basis of veracity. The
complete decay of the practice of confession in Anglo-Saxon
communities is a little hard to account for. Reaction against
popery is of course the historic explanation, for in popery
confession went with penances and absolution, and other
inadmissible practices. But on the <453> side of the sinner
himself it seems as if the need ought to have been too great to
accept so summary a refusal of its satisfaction. One would think
that in more men the shell of secrecy would have had to open, the
pent-in abscess to burst and gain relief, even though the ear
that heard the confession were unworthy. The Catholic church,
for obvious utilitarian reasons, has substituted auricular
confession to one priest for the more radical act of public
confession. We English-speaking Protestants, in the general
self-reliance and unsociability of our nature, seem to find it
enough if we take God alone into our confidence.[307]
The next topic on which I must comment is Prayer--and this time
it must be less briefly. We have heard much talk of late against
prayer, especially against prayers for better weather and for the
recovery of sick people. As regards prayers for the sick, if any
medical fact can be considered to stand firm, it is that in
certain environments prayer may contribute to recovery, and
should be encouraged as a therapeutic measure. Being a normal
factor of moral health in the person, its omission would be
deleterious. The case of the weather is different.
Notwithstanding the recency of the opposite belief,[308] every
one now knows that droughts and storms follow from physical
antecedents, and that moral appeals cannot avert them. But
petitional prayer is only one department of prayer; and if we
take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward
communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we
can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched.
Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of
religion. "Religion," says a liberal French theologian, "is an
intercourse, a conscious and voluntary relation, entered into by
a soul in distress with the mysterious power upon which it feels
itself to depend, and upon which its fate is contingent. This
intercourse with God is realized by prayer. Prayer is religion
in act; that is, prayer is real religion. It is prayer that
distinguishes the religious phenomenon from such similar or
neighboring phenomena as purely moral or aesthetic sentiment.
Religion is nothing if it be not the vital act by which the
entire mind seeks to save itself by clinging to the principle
from which it draws its life. This act is prayer, by which term
I understand no vain exercise of words, no mere repetition of
certain sacred formula, but the very movement itself of the soul,
putting itself in a personal relation of contact with the
mysterious power of which it feels the presence--it may be even
before it has a name by which to call it. Wherever this interior
prayer is lacking, there is no religion; wherever, on the other
hand, this prayer rises and stirs the soul, even in the absence
of forms or of doctrines, we have living religion. One sees from
this why "natural religion, so-called, is not properly a
religion. It cuts man off from prayer. It leaves him and God in
mutual remoteness, with no intimate commerce, no interior
dialogue, no interchange, no action of God in man, no return of
man to God. At bottom this pretended religion is only a
philosophy. Born at epochs of rationalism, of critical
investigations, it never was anything but an abstraction. An
artificial and dead creation, it reveals to its examiner hardly
one of the characters proper to religion."[309]
It seems to me that the entire series of our lectures proves the
truth of M. Sabatier's contention. The religious phenomenon,
studied as in Inner fact, and apart from ecclesiastical or
theological complications, has shown itself to consist
everywhere, and at all its stages, in the consciousness which
individuals have of an intercourse between themselves and higher
powers with which they feel themselves to be related. This
intercourse is realized at the time as being both active and
mutual. If it be not effective; if it be not a give and take
relation; if nothing be really transacted while it lasts; if the
world is in no whit different for its having taken place; then
prayer, taken in this wide meaning of a sense that SOMETHING IS
TRANSACTING, is of course a feeling of what is illusory, and
religion must on the whole be classed, not simply as containing
elements of delusion--these undoubtedly everywhere exist--but as
being rooted in delusion altogether, just as materialists and
atheists have always said it was. At most there might remain,
when the direct experiences of prayer were ruled out as false
witnesses, some inferential belief that the whole order of
existence must have a divine cause. But this way of
contemplating nature, pleasing as it would doubtless be to
persons of a pious taste, would leave to them but the spectators'
part at a play, whereas in experimental religion and the
prayerful life, we seem ourselves to be actors, and not in a
play, but in a very serious reality.
The genuineness of religion is thus indissolubly bound up with
the question whether the prayerful consciousness be or be not
deceitful. The conviction that something is genuinely transacted
in this consciousness is the very core of living religion. As to
what is transacted, great differences of opinion have prevailed.
The unseen powers have been supposed, and are yet supposed, to do
things which no enlightened man can nowadays believe in. It may
well prove that the sphere of influence in prayer is subjective
exclusively, and that what is immediately changed is only the
mind of the praying person. But however our opinion of prayer's
effects may come to be limited by criticism, religion, in the
vital sense in which these lectures study it, must stand or fall
by the persuasion that effects of some sort genuinely do occur.
Through prayer, religion insists, things which cannot be realized
in any other manner come about: energy which but for prayer
would be bound is by prayer set free and operates in some part,
be it objective or subjective, of the world of facts.
This postulate is strikingly expressed in a letter written by the
late Frederic W. H. Myers to a friend, who allows me to quote
from it. It shows how independent the prayer-instinct is of
usual doctrinal complications. Mr. Myers writes:--
"I am glad that you have asked me about prayer, because I have
rather strong ideas on the subject. First consider what are the
facts. There exists around us a spiritual universe, and that
universe is in actual relation with the material. From the
spiritual universe comes the energy which maintains the material;
the energy which makes the life of each individual spirit. Our
spirits are supported by a perpetual indrawal of this energy, and
the vigor of that indrawal is perpetually changing, much as the
vigor of our absorption of material nutriment changes from hour
to hour.
"I call these 'facts' because I think that some scheme of this
kind is the only one consistent with our actual evidence; too
complex to summarize here. How, then, should we ACT on these
facts? Plainly we must endeavor to draw in as much spiritual
life as possible, and we must place our minds in any attitude
which experience shows to be favorable to such indrawal. PRAYER
is the general name for that attitude of open and earnest
expectancy. If we then ask to whom to pray, the answer
(strangely enough) must be that THAT does not much matter. The
prayer is not indeed a purely subjective thing;--it means a real
increase in intensity of absorption of spiritual power or
grace;--but we do not know enough of what takes place in the
spiritual world to know how the prayer operates;--WHO is
cognizant of it, or through what channel the grace is given.
Better let children pray to Christ, who is at any rate the
highest individual spirit of whom we have any knowledge. But it
would be rash to say that Christ himself HEARS US; while to say
that GOD hears us is merely to restate the first principle--that
grace flows in from the infinite spiritual world."
Let us reserve the question of the truth or falsehood of the
belief that power is absorbed until the next lecture, when our
dogmatic conclusions, if we have any, must be reached. Let this
lecture still confine itself to the description of phenomena; and
as a concrete example of an extreme sort, of the way in which the
prayerful life may still be led, let me take a case with which
most of you must be acquainted, that of George Muller of Bristol,
who died in 1898. Muller's prayers were of the crassest
petitional order. Early in life he resolved on taking certain
Bible promises in literal sincerity, and on letting himself be
fed, not by his own worldly foresight, but by the Lord's hand.
He had an extraordinarily active and successful career, among the
fruits of which were the distribution of over two million copies
of the Scripture text, in different languages; the equipment of
several hundred missionaries; the circulation of more than a
hundred and eleven million of scriptural books, pamphlets, and
tracts; the building of five large orphanages, and the keeping
and educating of thousands of orphans; finally, the establishment
of schools in which over a hundred and twenty-one thousand
youthful and adult pupils were taught. In the course of this work
Mr. Muller received and administered nearly a million and a half
of pounds sterling, and traveled over two hundred thousand miles
of sea and land.[310] During the sixty-eight years of his
ministry, he never owned any property except his clothes and
furniture, and cash in hand; and he left, at the age of
eighty-six, an estate worth only a hundred and sixty pounds.
His method was to let his general wants be publicly known, but
not to acquaint other people with the details of his temporary
necessities. For the relief of the latter, he prayed directly to
the Lord, believing that sooner or later prayers are always
answered if one have trust enough. "When I lose such a thing as
a key," he writes, "I ask the Lord to direct me to it, and I look
for an answer to my prayer; when a person with whom I have made
an appointment does not come, according to the fixed time, and I
begin to be inconvenienced by it, I ask the Lord to be pleased to
hasten him to me, and I look for an answer; when I do not
understand a passage of the word of God, I lift up my heart to
the Lord that he would be pleased by his Holy Spirit to instruct
me, and I expect to be taught, though I do not fix the time when,
and the manner how it should be; when I am going to minister in
the Word, I seek help from the Lord, and . . . am not cast down,
but of good cheer because I look for his assistance."
Muller's custom was to never run up bills, not even for a week.
"As the Lord deals out to us by the day, . . . the week's payment
might become due and we have no money to meet it; and thus those
with whom we deal might be inconvenienced by us, and we be found
acting against the commandment of the Lord: 'Owe no man
anything.' From this day and henceforward whilst the Lord gives
to us our supplies by the day, we purpose to pay at once for
every article as it is purchased, and never to buy anything
except we can pay for it at once, however much it may seem to be
needed, and however much those with whom we deal may wish to be
paid only by the week."
The articles needed of which Muller speaks were the food, fuel,
etc., of his orphanages. Somehow, near as they often come to
going without a meal, they hardly ever seem actually to have done
so. "Greater and more manifest nearness of the Lord's presence I
have never had than when after breakfast there were no means for
dinner for more than a hundred persons; or when after dinner
there were no means for the tea, and yet the Lord provided the
tea; and all this without one single human being having been
informed about our need. . . . Through Grace my mind is so fully
assured of the faithfulness of the Lord, that in the midst of the
greatest need, I am enabled in peace to go about my other work.
Indeed, did not the Lord give me this, which is the result of
trusting in him, I should scarcely be able to work at all; for it
is now comparatively a rare thing that a day comes when I am not
in need for one or another part of the work."[311]
In building his orphanages simply by prayer and faith, Muller
affirms that his prime motive was "to have something to point to
as a visible proof that our God and Father is the same faithful
God that he ever was--as willing as ever to prove himself the
living God, in our day as formerly, to all that put their trust
in him."[312] For this reason he refused to borrow money for any
of his enterprises. "How does it work when we thus anticipate
God by going our own way? We certainly weaken faith instead of
increasing it; and each time we work thus a deliverance of our
own we find it more and more difficult to trust in God, till at
last we give way entirely to our natural fallen reason and
unbelief prevails. How different if one is enabled to wait God's
own time, and to look alone to him for help and deliverance! When
at last help comes, after many seasons of prayer it may be, how
sweet it is, and what a present recompense! Dear Christian
reader, if you have never walked in this path of obedience
before, do so now, and you will then know experimentally the
sweetness of the joy which results from it."[313]
When the supplies came in but slowly, Muller always considered
that this was for the trial of his faith and patience When his
faith and patience had been sufficiently tried, the Lord would
send more means. "And thus it has proved,"--I quote from his
diary--"for to-day was given me the sum of 2050 pounds, of which
2000 are for the building fund [of a certain house], and 50 for
present necessities. It is impossible to describe my joy in God
when I received this donation. I was neither excited nor
surprised; for I LOOK out for answers to my prayers. I BELIEVE
THAT GOD HEARS ME. Yet my heart was so full of joy that I could
only SIT before God, and admire him, like David in 2 Samuel vii.
At last I cast myself flat down upon my face and burst forth in
thanksgiving to God and in surrendering my heart afresh to him
for his blessed service."[314]
George Muller's is a case extreme in every respect, and in no
respect more so than in the extraordinary narrowness of the man's
intellectual horizon. His God was, as he often said, his
business partner. He seems to have been for Muller little more
than a sort of supernatural clergyman interested in the
congregation of tradesmen and others in Bristol who were his
saints, and in the orphanages and other enterprises, but
unpossessed of any of those vaster and wilder and more ideal
attributes with which the human imagination elsewhere has
invested him. Muller, in short, was absolutely unphilosophical.
His intensely private and practical conception of his relations
with the Deity continued the traditions of the most primitive
human thought.[315] When we compare a mind like his with such a
mind as, for example, Emerson's or Phillips Brooks's, we see the
range which the religious consciousness covers.
"With the assistance of God I kept my feet when they three and
one more did strive to throw me down. Feeling the Frenchman
which hung about my middle hang very heavy, I said to the boy,
'Go round the binnacle, and knock down that man that hangeth on
my back.' So the boy did strike him one blow on the head which
made him fall. . . . Then I looked about for a marlin spike or
anything else to strike them withal. But seeing nothing, I said,
'LORD! what shall I do?' Then casting up my eye upon my left
side, and seeing a marlin spike hanging, I jerked my right arm
and took hold, and struck the point four times about a quarter of
an inch deep into the skull of that man that had hold of my left
arm. [One of the Frenchmen then hauled the marlin spike away
from him.] But through GOD'S wonderful providence! it either
fell out of his hand, or else he threw it down, and at this time
the Almighty GOD gave me strength enough to take one man in one
hand, and throw at the other's head: and looking about again to
see anything to strike them withal, but seeing nothing, I said,
'LORD! what shall I do now?' And then it pleased GOD to put me
in mind of my knife in my pocket. And although two of the men
had hold of my right arm, yet GOD Almighty strengthened me so
that I put my right hand into my right pocket, drew out the knife
and sheath, . . . put it between my legs and drew it out, and
then cut the man's throat with it that had his back to my breast:
and he immediately dropt down, and scarce ever stirred after."--I
have slightly abridged Lyde's narrative.
There is an immense literature relating to answers to petitional
prayer. The evangelical journals are filled with such answers,
and books are devoted to the subject,[316] but for us Muller's
case will suffice.
A less sturdy beggar-like fashion of leading the prayerful life
is followed by innumerable other Christians. Persistence in
leaning on the Almighty for support and guidance will, such
persons say, bring with it proofs, palpable but much more subtle,
of his presence and active influence. The following description
of a "led" life, by a German writer whom I have already quoted,
would no doubt appear to countless Christians in every country as
if transcribed from their own personal experience. One finds in
this guided sort of life, says Dr. Hilty--
"That books and words (and sometimes people) come to one's
cognizance just at the very moment in which one needs them; that
one glides over great dangers as if with shut eyes, remaining
ignorant of what would have terrified one or led one astray,
until the peril is past--this being especially the case with
temptations to vanity and sensuality; that paths on which one
ought not to wander are, as it were, hedged off with thorns; but
that on the other side great obstacles are suddenly removed; that
when the time has come for something, one suddenly receives a
courage that formerly failed, or perceives the root of a matter
that until then was concealed, or discovers thoughts, talents,
yea, even pieces of knowledge and insight, in one's self, of
which it is impossible to say whence they come; finally, that
persons help us or decline to help us, favor us or refuse us, as
if they had to do so against their will, so that often those
indifferent or even unfriendly to us yield us the greatest
service and furtherance. (God takes often their worldly goods,
from those whom he leads, at just the right moment, when they
threaten to impede the effort after higher interests.)
"Besides all this, other noteworthy things come to pass, of which
it is not easy to give account. There is no doubt whatever that
now one walks continually through 'open doors' and on the easiest
roads, with as little care and trouble as it is possible to
imagine.
"Furthermore one finds one's self settling one's affairs neither
too early nor too late, whereas they were wont to be spoiled by
untimeliness, even when the preparations had been well laid. In
addition to this, one does them with perfect tranquillity of
mind, almost as if they were matters of no consequence, like
errands done by us for another person, in which case we usually
act more calmly than when we act in our own concerns. Again, one
finds that one can WAIT for everything patiently, and that is one
of life's great arts. One finds also that each thing comes duly,
one thing after the other, so that one gains time to make one's
footing sure before advancing farther. And then every thing
occurs to us at the right moment, just what we ought to do, etc.,
and often in a very striking way, just as if a third person were
keeping watch over those things which we are in easy danger of
forgetting.
"Often, too, persons are sent to us at the right time, to offer
or ask for what is needed, and what we should never have had the
courage or resolution to undertake of our own accord.
"Through all these experiences one finds that one is kindly and
tolerant of other people, even of such as are repulsive,
negligent, or ill-willed, for they also are instruments of good
in God's hand, and often most efficient ones. Without these
thoughts it would be hard for even the best of us always to keep
our equanimity. But with the consciousness of divine guidance,
one sees many a thing in life quite differently from what would
otherwise be possible.
"All these are things that every human being KNOWS, who has had
experience of them; and of which the most speaking examples could
be brought forward. The highest resources of worldly wisdom are
unable to attain that which, under divine leading, comes to us of
its own accord."[317]
Such accounts as this shade away into others where the belief is,
not that particular events are tempered more towardly to us by a
superintending providence, as a reward for our reliance, but that
by cultivating the continuous sense of our connection with the
power that made things as they are, we are tempered more towardly
for their reception. The outward face of nature need not alter,
but the expressions of meaning in it alter. It was dead and is
alive again. It is like the difference between looking on a
person without love, or upon the same person with love. In the
latter case intercourse springs into new vitality. So when one's
affections keep in touch with the divinity of the world's
authorship, fear and egotism fall away; and in the equanimity
that follows, one finds in the hours, as they succeed each other,
a series of purely benignant opportunities. It is as if all
doors were opened, and all paths freshly smoothed. We meet a new
world when we meet the old world in the spirit which this kind of
prayer infuses.
Such a spirit was that of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.[318] It
is that of mind-curers, of the transcendentalists, and of the
so-called "liberal" Christians. As an expression of it, I will
quote a page from one of Martineau's sermons:--
"The universe, open to the eye to-day, looks as it did a thousand
years ago: and the morning hymn of Milton does but tell the
beauty with which our own familiar sun dressed the earliest
fields and gardens of the world. We see what all our fathers
saw. And if we cannot find God in your house or in mine, upon
the roadside or the margin of the sea; in the bursting seed or
opening flower; in the day duty or the night musing; in the
general laugh and the secret grief; in the procession of life,
ever entering afresh, and solemnly passing by and dropping off; I
do not think we should discern him any more on the grass of Eden,
or beneath the moonlight of Gethsemane. Depend upon it, it is
not the want of greater miracles, but of the soul to perceive
such as are allowed us still, that makes us push all the
sanctities into the far spaces we cannot reach. The devout feel
that wherever God's hand is, THERE is miracle: and it is simply
an indevoutness which imagines that only where miracle is, can
there be the real hand of God. The customs of Heaven ought
surely to be more sacred in our eyes than its anomalies; the dear
old ways, of which the Most High is never tired, than the strange
things which he does not love well enough ever to repeat. And he
who will but discern beneath the sun, as he rises any morning,
the supporting finger of the Almighty, may recover the sweet and
reverent surprise with which Adam gazed on the first dawn in
Paradise. It is no outward change, no shifting in time or place;
but only the loving meditation of the pure in heart, that can
reawaken the Eternal from the sleep within our souls: that can
render him a reality again, and reassert for him once more his
ancient name of 'the Living God.'"[319]
When we see all things in God, and refer all things to him, we
read in common matters superior expressions of meaning. The
deadness with which custom invests the familiar vanishes, and
existence as a whole appears transfigured. The state of a mind
thus awakened from torpor is well expressed in these words, which
I take from a friend's letter:--
"If we occupy ourselves in summing up all the mercies and
bounties we are privileged to have, we are overwhelmed by their
number (so great that we can imagine ourselves unable to give
ourselves time even to begin to review the things we may imagine
WE HAVE NOT). We sum them and realize that WE ARE ACTUALLY
KILLED WITH GOD'S KINDNESS; that we are surrounded by bounties
upon bounties, without which all would fall. Should we not love
it; should we not feel buoyed up by the Eternal Arms?"
Sometimes this realization that facts are of divine sending,
instead of being habitual, is casual, like a mystical experience.
Father Gratry gives this instance from his youthful melancholy
period:--
"One day I had a moment of consolation, because I met with
something which seemed to me ideally perfect. It was a poor
drummer beating the tattoo in the streets of Paris. I walked
behind him in returning to the school on the evening of a
holiday. His drum gave out the tattoo in such a way that, at that
moment at least, however peevish I were, I could find no pretext
for fault-finding. It was impossible to conceive more nerve or
spirit, better time or measure, more clearness or richness, than
were in this drumming. Ideal desire could go no farther in that
direction. I was enchanted and consoled; the perfection of this
wretched act did me good. Good is at least possible, I said.
since the ideal can thus sometimes get embodied."[320]
In Senancour's novel of Obermann a similar transient lifting of
the veil is recorded. In Paris streets, on a March day, he comes
across a flower in bloom, a jonquil:
"It was the strongest expression of desire: it was the first
perfume of the year. I felt all the happiness destined for man.
This unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal
world, arose in me complete. I never felt anything so great or
so instantaneous. I know not what shape, what analogy, what
secret of relation it was that made me see in this flower a
limitless beauty. . . . I shall never inclose in a conception
this power, this immensity that nothing will express; this form
that nothing will contain; this ideal of a better world which one
feels, but which, it seems, nature has not made actual."[321]
We heard in previous lectures of the vivified face of the world
as it may appear to converts after their awakening.[322] As a
rule, religious persons generally assume that whatever natural
facts connect themselves in any way with their destiny are
significant of the divine purposes with them. Through prayer
the purpose, often far from obvious, comes home to them, and if
it be "trial," strength to endure the trial is given. Thus at
all stages of the prayerful life we find the persuasion that in
the process of communion energy from on high flows in to meet
demand, and becomes operative within the phenomenal world. So
long as this operativeness is admitted to be real, it makes no
essential difference whether its immediate effects be subjective
or objective. The fundamental religious point is that in prayer,
spiritual energy, which otherwise would slumber, does become
active, and spiritual work of some kind is effected really.
So much for Prayer, taken in the wide sense of any kind of
communion. As the core of religion, we must return to it in the
next lecture.
The last aspect of the religious life which remains for me to
touch upon is the fact that its manifestations so frequently
connect themselves with the subconscious part of our existence.
You may remember what I said in my opening lecture[323] about the
prevalence of the psychopathic temperament in religious
biography. You will in point of fact hardly find a religious
leader of any kind in whose life there is no record of
automatisms. I speak not merely of savage priests and prophets,
whose followers regard automatic utterance and action as by
itself tantamount to inspiration, I speak of leaders of thought
and subjects of intellectualized experience. Saint Paul had his
visions, his ecstasies, his gift of tongues, small as was the
importance he attached to the latter. The whole array of
Christian saints and heresiarchs, including the greatest, the
Barnards, the Loyolas, the Luthers, the Foxes, the Wesleys, had
their visions, voices, rapt conditions, guiding impressions, and
"openings." They had these things, because they had exalted
sensibility, and to such things persons of exalted sensibility
are liable. In such liability there lie, however, consequences
for theology. Beliefs are strengthened wherever automatisms
corroborate them. Incursions from beyond the transmarginal
region have a peculiar power to increase conviction. The
inchoate sense of presence is infinitely stronger than
conception, but strong as it may be, it is seldom equal to the
evidence of hallucination. Saints who actually see or hear their
Saviour reach the acme of assurance. Motor automatisms, though
rarer, are, if possible, even more convincing than sensations.
The subjects here actually feel themselves played upon by powers
beyond their will. The evidence is dynamic; the God or spirit
moves the very organs of their body.[324]
The great field for this sense of being the instrument of a
higher power is of course "inspiration." It is easy to
discriminate between the religious leaders who have been
habitually subject to inspiration and those who have not. In the
teachings of the Buddha, of Jesus, of Saint Paul (apart from his
gift of tongues), of Saint Augustine, of Huss, of Luther, of
Wesley, automatic or semi-automatic composition appears to have
been only occasional. In the Hebrew prophets, on the contrary,
in Mohammed, in some of the Alexandrians, in many minor Catholic
saints, in Fox, in Joseph Smith, something like it appears to
have been frequent, sometimes habitual. We have distinct
professions of being under the direction of a foreign power, and
serving as its mouthpiece. As regards the Hebrew prophets, it is
extraordinary, writes an author who has made a careful study of
them, to see--
"How, one after another, the same features are reproduced in the
prophetic books. The process is always extremely different from
what it would be if the prophet arrived at his insight into
spiritual things by the tentative efforts of his own genius.
There is something sharp and sudden about it. He can lay his
finger, so to speak, on the moment when it came. And it always
comes in the form of an overpowering force from without, against
which he struggles, but in vain. Listen, for instance, [to] the
opening of the book of Jeremiah. Read through in like manner the
first two chapters of the prophecy of Ezekiel.
"It is not, however, only at the beginning of his career that the
prophet passes through a crisis which is clearly not self-
caused. Scattered all through the prophetic writings are
expressions which speak of some strong and irresistible impulse
coming down upon the prophet, determining his attitude to the
events of his time, constraining his utterance, making his words
the vehicle of a higher meaning than their own. For instance,
this of Isaiah's: 'The Lord spake thus to me with a strong
hand,'--an emphatic phrase which denotes the overmastering nature
of the impulse--'and instructed me that I should not walk in the
way of this people.' . . . Or passages like this from Ezekiel:
'The hand of the Lord God fell upon me,' 'The hand of the Lord
was strong upon me.' The one standing characteristic of the
prophet is that he speaks with the authority of Jehovah himself.
Hence it is that the prophets one and all preface their addresses
so confidently, 'The Word of the Lord,' or 'Thus saith the Lord.'
They have even the audacity to speak in the first person, as if
Jehovah himself were speaking. As in Isaiah: 'Hearken unto me,
O Jacob, and Israel my called; I am He, I am the First, I also am
the last,'--and so on. The personality of the prophet sinks
entirely into the background; he feels himself for the time being
the mouthpiece of the Almighty."[325]
"We need to remember that prophecy was a profession, and that the
prophets formed a professional class. There were schools of the
prophets, in which the gift was regularly cultivated. A group of
young men would gather round some commanding figure--a Samuel or
an Elisha--and would not only record or spread the knowledge of
his sayings and doings, but seek to catch themselves something of
his inspiration. It seems that music played its part in their
exercises. . . . It is perfectly clear that by no means all of
these Sons of the prophets ever succeeded in acquiring more than
a very small share in the gift which they sought. It was clearly
possible to 'counterfeit' prophecy. Sometimes this was done
deliberately. . . . But it by no means follows that in all cases
where a false message was given, the giver of it was altogether
conscious of what he was doing.[326]
Here, to take another Jewish case, is the way in which Philo of
Alexandria describes his inspiration:--
"Sometimes, when I have come to my work empty, I have suddenly
become full; ideas being in an invisible manner showered upon me,
and implanted in me from on high; so that through the influence
of divine inspiration, I have become greatly excited, and have
known neither the place in which I was, nor those who were
present, nor myself, nor what I was saying, nor what I was
writing, for then I have been conscious of a richness of
interpretation, an enjoyment of light, a most penetrating
insight, a most manifest energy in all that was to be done;
having such effect on my mind as the clearest ocular
demonstration would have on the eyes."[327]
If we turn to Islam, we find that Mohammed's revelations all came
from the subconscious sphere. To the question in what way he got
them--
"Mohammed is said to have answered that sometimes he heard a
knell as from a bell, and that this had the strongest effect on
him; and when the angel went away, he had received the
revelation. Sometimes again he held converse with the angel as
with a man, so as easily to understand his words. The later
authorities, however, . . . distinguish still other kinds. In
the Itgan (103) the following are enumerated: 1, revelations
with sound of bell, 2, by inspiration of the holy spirit in M.'s
heart, 3, by Gabriel in human form, 4, by God immediately, either
when awake (as in his journey to heaven) or in dream. . . . In
Almawahib alladuniya the kinds are thus given: 1, Dream, 2,
Inspiration of Gabriel in the Prophet's heart, 3, Gabriel taking
Dahya's form, 4, with the bell-sound, etc., 5, Gabriel in propria
persona (only twice), 6, revelation in heaven, 7, God appearing
in person, but veiled, 8, God revealing himself immediately
without veil. Others add two other stages, namely: 1, Gabriel
in the form of still another man, 2, God showing himself
personally in dream."[328]
In none of these cases is the revelation distinctly motor. In the
case of Joseph Smith (who had prophetic revelations innumerable
in addition to the revealed translation of the <472> gold plates
which resulted in the Book of Mormon), although there may have
been a motor element, the inspiration seems to have been
predominantly sensorial. He began his translation by the aid of
the "peep-stones" which he found, or thought or said that he
found, with the gold plates --apparently a case of "crystal
gazing." For some of the other revelations he used the
peep-stones, but seems generally to have asked the Lord for more
direct instruction.[329]
"It may be very interesting for you to know that the President
[Mr. Snow] of the Mormon Church claims to have had a number of
revelations very recently from heaven. To explain fully what
these revelations are, it is necessary to know that we, as a
people, believe that the Church of Jesus Christ has again been
established through messengers sent from heaven. This Church has
at its head a prophet seer, and revelator, who gives to man God's
holy will. Revelation is the means through which the will of God
is declared directly and in fullness to man. These revelations
are got through dreams of sleep or in waking visions of the mind,
by voices without visional appearance or by actual manifestations
of the Holy Presence before the eye. We believe that God has
come in person and spoken to our prophet and revelator."
Other revelations are described as "openings"--Fox's, for
example, were evidently of the kind known in spiritistic circles
of to-day as "impressions." As all effective initiators of
change must needs live to some degree upon this psychopathic
level of sudden perception or conviction of new truth, or of
impulse to action so obsessive that it must be worked off, I will
say nothing more about so very common a phenomenon.
When, in addition to these phenomena of inspiration, we take
religious mysticism into the account, when we recall the striking
and sudden unifications of a discordant self which we saw in
conversion, and when we review the extravagant obsessions of
tenderness, purity, and self-severity met with in saintliness, we
cannot, I think, avoid the conclusion that in religion we have a
department of human nature with unusually close relations to the
transmarginal or subliminal region. If the word "subliminal" is
offensive to any of you, as smelling too much of psychical
research or other aberrations, call it by any other name you
please, to distinguish it from the level of full sunlit
consciousness. Call this latter the A-region of personality, if
you care to, and call the other the B-region. The B-region,
then, is obviously the larger part of each of us, for it is the
abode of everything that is latent and the reservoir of
everything that passes unrecorded or unobserved. It contains,
for example, such things as all our momentarily inactive
memories, and it harbors the springs of all our obscurely motived
passions, impulses, likes, dislikes, and prejudices. Our
intuitions, hypotheses, fancies, superstitions, persuasions,
convictions, and in general all our non-rational operations, come
from it. It is the source of our dreams, and apparently they may
return to it. In it arise whatever mystical experiences we may
have, and our automatisms, sensory or motor; our life in hypnotic
and "hypnoid" conditions, if we are subjects to such conditions;
our delusions, fixed ideas, and hysterical accidents, if we are
hysteric subjects; our supra-normal cognitions, if such there be,
and if we are telepathic subjects. It is also the fountain-head
of much that feeds our religion. In persons deep in the religious
life, as we have now abundantly seen--and this is my
conclusion--the door into this region seems unusually wide open;
at any rate, experiences making their entrance through that door
have had emphatic influence in shaping religious history.
With this conclusion I turn back and close the circle which I
opened in my first lecture, terminating thus the review which I
then announced of inner religious phenomena as we find them in
developed and articulate human individuals. I might easily, if
the time allowed, multiply both my documents and my
discriminations, but a broad treatment is, I believe, in itself
better, and the most important characteristics of the subject
lie, I think, before us already. In the next lecture, which is
also the last one, we must try to draw the critical conclusions
which so much material may suggest.
[301] Idea of a University, Discourse III. Section 7. [302] Newman's imagination so innately craved an ecclesiastical system that he can write: "From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion." And again speaking of himself about the age of thirty, he writes: "I loved to act as feeling myself in my Bishop's sight, as if it were the sight of God." Apologia, 1897, pp. 48, 50. [303] The intellectual difference is quite on a par in practical importance with the analogous difference in character. We saw, under the head of Saintliness, how some characters resent confusion and must live in purity, consistency, simplicity (above, p. 275 ff.). For others, on the contrary, superabundance, over-pressure, stimulation, lots of superficial relations, are indispensable. There are men who would suffer a very syncope if you should pay all their debts, bring it about that their engagements had been kept, their letters answered their perplexities relieved, and their duties fulfilled, down to one which lay on a clean table under their eyes with nothing to interfere with its immediate performance. A day stripped so staringly bare would be for them appalling. So with ease, elegance, tributes of affection, social recognitions--some of us require amounts of these things which to others would appear a mass of lying and sophistication. [305] Compare the informality of Protestantism, where the "meek lover of the good," alone with his God, visits the sick, etc., for their own sakes, with the elaborate "business" that goes on in Catholic devotion, and carries with it the social excitement of all more complex businesses. An essentially worldly-minded Catholic woman can become a visitor of the sick on purely coquettish principles, with her confessor and director, her "merit" storing up, her patron saints, her privileged relation to the Almighty, drawing his attention as a professional devote, her definite "exercises," and her definitely recognized social pose in the organization. [306] Above, p. 354 ff. [307] A fuller discussion of confession is contained in the excellent work by Frank Granger: The Soul of a Christian, London, 1900, ch. xii. [308] Example: "The minister at Sudbury, being at the Thursday lecture in Boston, heard the officiating clergyman praying for rain. As soon as the service was over, he went to the petitioner and said 'You Boston ministers, as soon as a tulip wilts under your windows, go to church and pray for rain, until all Concord and Sudbury are under water.'" R. W. Emerson: Lectures and Biographical Sketches, p. 363. [309] Auguste Sabatier: Esquisse d'une Philosophie de la Religion. 2me ed., 1897, pp. 24-26, abridged. [310] My authority for these statistics is the little work on Muller, by Frederic G. Warne, New York, 1898. [311] The Life of Trust; Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings with George Muller, New American edition, N. Y., Crowell, pp. 228, 194, 219. [312] Ibid., p. 126. [313] Op. cit., p. 383, abridged. [314] Ibid., p. 323 [315] I cannot resist the temptation of quoting an expression of an even more primitive style of religious thought, which I find in Arber's English Garland, vol. vii. p. 440. Robert Lyde, an English sailor, along with an English boy, being prisoners on a French ship in 1689, set upon the crew, of seven Frenchmen, killed two, made the other five prisoners, and brought home the ship. Lyde thus describes how in this feat he found his God a very present help in time of trouble:-- [316] As, for instance, In Answer to Prayer, by the Bishop of Ripon and others, London, 1898; Touching Incidents and Remarkable Answers to Prayer, Harrisburg, Pa., 1898 (?); H. L. Hastings: The Guiding Hand, or Providential Direction, illustrated by Authentic Instances, Boston, 1898(?). [317] C. Hilty: Gluck, Dritter Theil, 1900, pp. 92 ff. [318] "Good Heaven!" says Epictetus, "any one thing in the creation is sufficient to demonstrate a Providence, to a humble and grateful mind. The mere possibility of producing milk from grass, cheese from milk, and wool from skins; who formed and planned it? Ought we not, whether we dig or plough or eat, to sing this hymn to God? Great is God, who has supplied us with these instruments to till the ground; great is God, who has given us hands and instruments of digestion, who has given us to grow insensibly and to breathe in sleep. These things we ought forever to celebrate. . . . But because the most of you are blind and insensible, there must be some one to fill this station, and lead, in behalf of all men, the hymn to God; for what else can I do, a lame old man, but sing hymns to God? Were I a nightingale, I would act the part of a nightingale; were I a swan, the part of a swan. But since I am a reasonable creature, it is my duty to praise God . . . and I call on you to join the same song." Works, book i. ch. xvi., Carter-Higginson (translation) abridged. [319] James Martineau: end of the sermon "Help Thou Mine Unbelief," in Endeavours after a Christian Life, 2d series. Compare with this page the extract from Voysey on p. 270, above, and those from Pascal and Madame Guyon on p. 281. [320] Souvenirs de ma Jeunesse, 1897, p. 122. [321] Op. cit., Letter XXX. [322] Above, p. 243 ff. Compare the withdrawal of expression from the world, in Melancholiacs, p. 148. [323] Above, pp. 25, 26. [324] A friend of mine, a first-rate psychologist, who is a subject of graphic automatism, tells me that the appearance of independent actuation in the movements of his arm, when he writes automatically, is so distinct that it obliges him to abandon a psychophysical theory which he had previously believed in, the theory, namely, that we have no feeling of the discharge downwards of our voluntary motor-centres. We must normally have such a feeling, he thinks, or the SENSE OF AN ABSENCE would not be so striking as it is in these experiences. Graphic automatism of a fully developed kind is rare in religious history, so far as my knowledge goes. Such statements as Antonia Bourignon's, that "I do nothing but lend my hand and spirit to another power than mine," is shown by the context to indicate inspiration rather than directly automatic writing. In some eccentric sects this latter occurs. The most striking instance of it is probably the bulky volume called, "Oahspe, a new Bible in the Words of Jehovah and his angel ambassadors," Boston and London, 1891, written and illustrated automatically by Dr. Newbrough of New York, whom I understand to be now, or to have been lately, at the head of the spiritistic community of Shalam in New Mexico. The latest automatically written book which has come under my notice is "Zertouhem's Wisdom of the Ages," by George A. Fuller, Boston, 1901.[325] W. Sanday: The Oracles of God, London, 1892, pp. 49-56, abridged. [326] Op. cit., p. 91. This author also cites Moses's and Isaiah's commissions, as given in Exodus, chaps. iii. and iv., and Isaiah, chap. vi. [327] Quoted by Augustus Clissold: The Prophetic Spirit in Genius and Madness, 1870, p. 67. Mr. Clissold is a Swedenborgian. Swedenborg's case is of course the palmary one of audita et visa, serving as a basis of religious revelation. [328] Noldeke, Geschichte des Qorans, 1860, p. 16. Compare the fuller account in Sir William Muir's: Life of Mahomet, 3d ed., 1894, ch. iii. [329] The Mormon theocracy has always been governed by direct revelations accorded to the President of the Church and its Apostles. From an obliging letter written to me in 1899 by an eminent Mormon, I quote the following extract:--BACK | FORWARD
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