CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC
41
for volunteers. Even a sick man, unable to be militant outwardly,
can carry on the moral warfare. He can willfully turn his attention
away from his own future, whether in this world or the next.
He can train himself to indifference to his present drawbacks and
immerse himself in whatever objective interests still remain access-
ible. He can follow public news, and sympathize with other people’s
affairs. He can cultivate cheerful manners, and be silent about his
miseries. He can contemplate whatever ideal aspects of existence
his philosophy is able to present to him, and practice whatever
duties, such as patience, resignation, trust, his ethical system requires.
Such a man lives on his loftiest, largest plane. He is a high-hearted
freeman and no pining slave. And yet he lacks something which
the Christian par excellence, the mystic and ascetic saint, for example,
has in abundant measure, and which makes of him a human being
of an altogether different denomination.
The Christian also spurns the pinched and mumping sick-room
attitude, and the lives of saints are full of a kind of callousness to
diseased conditions of body which probably no other human records
show. But whereas the merely moralistic spurning takes an effort of
volition, the Christian spurning is the result of the excitement of a
higher kind of emotion, in the presence of which no exertion of
volition is required. The moralist must hold his breath and keep his
muscles tense; and so long as this athletic attitude is possible all
goes well — morality suffices. But the athletic attitude tends ever
to break down, and it inevitably does break down even in the most
stalwart when the organism begins to decay, or when morbid fears
invade the mind. To suggest personal will and effort to one all
sicklied o’er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest
the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled
in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe
recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is. Well,
we are all such helpless failures in the last resort. The sanest and best
of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison inmates, and death
finally runs the robustest of us down. And whenever we feel this,
such a sense of the vanity and provisionality of our voluntary career
comes over us that all our morality appears but as a plaster hiding
a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest
substitute for that well-being that our lives ought to be grounded in,
but, alas! are not.
42
THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
And here religion comes to our rescue and takes our fate into
her hands. There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to
no others, in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own
has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as
nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God. In this state of mind,
what we most dreaded has become the habitation of our safety, and
the hour of our moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday.
The time for tension in our soul is over, and that of happy relaxation,
of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant
future to be anxious about, has arrived. Fear is not held in abeyance
as it is by mere morality, it is positively expunged and washed away.
We shall see abundant examples of this happy state of mind in
later lectures of this course. We shall see how infinitely passionate
a thing religion at its highest flights can be. Like love, like wrath,
like hope, ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness
and impulse, it adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally
or logically deducible from anything else. This enchantment,
coming as a gift when it does come, — a gift of our organism, the
physiologists will tell us, a gift of God’s grace, the theologians say,
— is either there or not there for us, and there are persons who can
no more become possessed by it than they can fall in love with a
given woman by mere word of command. Religious feeling is thus
an absolute addition to the Subject’s range of life. It gives him a
new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the
outer world disowns him, it redeems and vivifies an interior world
which otherwise would be an empty waste.
If religion is to mean anything definite for us, it seems to me that
we ought to take it as meaning this added dimension of emotion,
this enthusiastic temper of espousal, in regions where morality strictly
so called can at best but bow its head and acquiesce. It ought to
mean nothing short of this new reach of freedom for us, with the
struggle over, the keynote of the universe sounding in our ears, and
everlasting possession spread before our eyes.
1
This sort of happiness in the absolute and everlasting is what we
find nowhere but in religion. It is parted off from all mere animal
1
Once more, there are plenty of men, constitutionally sombre men, in whose religious
life this rapturousness is lacking. They are religious in the wider sense; yet in this acutest of
all senses they are not so, and it is religion in the acutest sense that I wish, without disputing
about words, to study first, so as to get at its typical differentia.