THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN
55
of his religious life. It seems to me to show clearly that the feeling
of reality may be something more like a sensation than an intellec-
tual operation properly so-called.
“Between twenty and thirty I gradually became more and more agnostic
and irreligious, yet I cannot say that I ever lost that ‘indefinite conscious-
ness’ which Herbert Spencer describes so well, of an Absolute Reality
behind phenomena. For me this Reality was not the pure Unknowable
of Spencer’s philosophy, for although I had ceased my childish prayers
to God, and never prayed to It in a formal manner, yet my more recent
experience shows me to have been in a relation to It which practically
was the same thing as prayer. Whenever I had any trouble, especially
when I had conflict with other people, either domestically or in the way
of business, or when I was depressed in spirits or anxious about affairs,
I now recognize that I used to fall back for support upon this curious
relation I felt myself to be in to this fundamental cosmical It. It was on my
side, or I was on Its side, however you please to term it, in the particular
trouble, and it always strengthened me and seemed to give me endless
vitality to feel its underlying and supporting presence. In fact, it was an
unfailing fountain of living justice, truth, and strength, to which I instinc-
tively turned at times of weakness, and it always brought me out. I know
now that it was a personal relation I was in to it, because of late years
the power of communicating with it has left me, and I am conscious of a
perfectly definite loss. I used never to fail to find it when I turned to it.
Then came a set of years when sometimes I found it, and then again
I would be wholly unable to make connection with it. I remember many
occasions on which at night in bed, I would be unable to get to sleep on
account of worry. I turned this way and that in the darkness, and groped
mentally for the familiar sense 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 there
instead of It: I couldn’t find anything. Now, at the age of nearly fifty,
my power of getting into connection with it has entirely left me; and I
have to confess that a great help has gone out of my life. Life has become
curiously dead and indifferent; and I can now see that my old experience
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, but just my own instinctive and
individual God, whom I relied upon for higher sympathy, but whom some-
how I have lost.”
Nothing is more common in the pages of religious biography
than the way in which seasons of lively and of difficult faith are
56
THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
described as alternating. Probably every religious person has the
recollection of particular crises 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.
In James Russell Lowell’s correspondence there is a brief memor-
andum of an experience of this kind: —
“I had a revelation last Friday evening. I was at Mary’s, and happening
to say something of the presence of spirits (of whom, I said, I was often
dimly aware), Mr. Putnam entered into an argument with me on spiritual
matters. As I was speaking, the whole system rose up before me like a
vague destiny looming from the Abyss. I never before so clearly felt the
Spirit of God in me and around me. The whole room seemed to me full of
God. The air seemed to waver to and fro with the presence of Something
I knew not what. I spoke with the calmness and clearness of a prophet. I
cannot tell you what this revelation was. I have not yet studied it enough.
But I shall perfect it one day, and then you shall hear it and acknowledge
its grandeur.”
1
Here is a longer and more developed experience from a manu-
script communication by a clergyman, — I take it from Starbuck’s
manuscript collection: —
“I remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hilltop, where
my soul opened out, as it were, 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 being
answered by the unfathomable deep without, reaching beyond the stars. I
stood alone with Him who had made me, and all the beauty of the world,
and love, and sorrow, and even temptation. I did not seek Him, but felt
the perfect unison of my spirit with His. The ordinary sense of things
around me faded. For the moment nothing but an ineffable joy and exalta-
tion remained. It is impossible fully to describe the experience. It was like
the effect of some great orchestra when all the separate notes have melted
into one swelling harmony that leaves the listener conscious of nothing
save that his soul is being wafted upwards, and almost bursting with its
own emotion. The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more
solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt
because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that He was
there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real
of the two.
1
Letters of Lowell, i. 75.