376
THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
almost appalled at the amount of emotionality which I find in it.
After so much of this, we can afford to be dryer and less sympath-
etic in the rest of the work that lies before us.
The sentimentality of many of my documents is a consequence
of the fact that I sought them among the extravagances of the
subject. If any of you are enemies of what our ancestors used to
brand as enthusiasm, and are, nevertheless, still listening to me now,
you have probably felt my selection to have been sometimes almost
perverse, and have wished I might have stuck to soberer examples.
I reply that I took these extremer examples as yielding the profounder
information. To learn the secrets of any science, we go to expert
specialists, even though they may be eccentric persons, and not to
commonplace pupils. We combine what they tell us with the rest
of our wisdom, and form our final judgment independently. Even
so with religion. We who have pursued such radical expressions
of it may now be sure that we know its secrets as authentically as
any one can know them who learns them from another; and we
have next to answer, each of us for himself, the practical question:
what are the dangers in this element of life? and in what proportion
may it need to be restrained by other elements, to give the proper
balance?
But this question suggests another one which I will answer
immediately and get it out of the way, for it has more than once
already vexed us.
1
Ought it to be assumed that in all men the
mixture of religion with other elements should be identical? Ought
it, indeed, to be assumed that the lives of all men should show
identical religious elements? In other words, is the existence of so
many religious types and sects and creeds regrettable?
To these questions I answer “No” emphatically. And my reason
is that I do not see how it is possible that creatures in such different
positions and with such different powers as human individuals are,
should have exactly the same functions and the same duties. No two
of us have identical difficulties, nor should we be expected to work
out identical solutions. Each, from his peculiar angle of observation,
takes in a certain sphere of fact and trouble, which each must deal
with in a unique manner. One of us must soften himself, another
1
For example, on pages 109, 130, 260, above.
CONCLUSIONS
377
must harden himself; one must yield a point, another must stand
firm, — in order the better to defend the position assigned him.
If an Emerson were forced to be a Wesley, or a Moody forced to be
a Whitman, the total human consciousness of the divine would
suffer. The divine can mean no single quality, it must mean a group
of qualities, by being champions of which in alternation, different
men may all find worthy missions. Each attitude being a syllable in
human nature’s total message, it takes the whole of us to spell the
meaning out completely. So a “god of battles” must be allowed to
be the god for one kind of person, a god of peace and heaven and
home, the god for another. We must frankly recognize the fact that
we live in partial systems, and that parts are not interchangeable in
the spiritual life. If we are peevish and jealous, destruction of the
self must be an element of our religion; why need it be one if we
are good and sympathetic from the outset? If we are sick souls, we
require a religion of deliverance; but why think so much of deliver-
ance, if we are healthy-minded?
1
Unquestionably, some men have
the completer experience and the higher vocation, here just as in
the social world; but for each man to stay in his own experience,
whate’er it be, and for others to tolerate him there, is surely best.
But, you may now ask, would not this one-sidedness be cured if
we should all espouse the science of religions as our own religion?
1
From this point of view, the contrasts between the healthy and the morbid mind, and
between the once-born and the twice-born types, of which I spoke in earlier lectures (see
pp. 129–133), cease to be the radical antagonisms which many think them. The twice-
born look down upon the rectilinear consciousness of life of the once-born as being “mere
morality,” and not properly religion. “Dr. Channing,” an orthodox minister is reported to
have said, “is excluded from the highest form of religions life by the extraordinary rectitude
of his character.” It is indeed true that the outlook upon life of the twice-born — holding as
it does more of the element of evil in solution — is the wider and completer. The “heroic”
or “solemn” way in which life comes to them is a “higher synthesis” into which healthy-
mindedness and morbidness both enter and combine. Evil is not evaded, but sublated in the
higher religions cheer of these persons (see pp. 47–52, 362–365). But the final consciousness
which each type reaches of union with the divine has the same practical significance for
the individual; and individuals may well he allowed to get to it by the channels which lie
most open to their several temperaments. In the cases which were quoted in Lecture IV, of
the mind-cure form of healthy-mindedness, we found abundant examples of regenerative
process. The severity of the crisis in this process is a matter of degree. How long one shall
continue to drink the consciousness of evil, and when one shall begin to short-circuit and
get rid of it, are also matters of amount and degree, so that in many instances it is quite
arbitrary whether we class the individual as a once-born or a twice-born subject.