_On an Intermediate State, or State of Transition from Morality to
Spiritual Religion._
This Aphorism would, it may seem, have been placed more fitly in the
Chapter following. In placing it here, I have been determined by the
following convictions: 1. Every state, and consequently that which we
have described as the state of Religious Morality, which is not
progressive, is dead, or retrograde. 2. As a pledge of this
progression, or, at least, as the form in which the propulsive
tendency shows itself, there are certain Hopes, Aspirations,
Yearnings, that, with more or less of consciousness, rise and stir in
the Heart of true Morality as naturally as the sap in the full-formed
stem of a rose flows towards the bud, within which the flower is
maturing. 3. No one, whose own experience authorizes him to confirm
the truth of this statement, can have been conversant with the volumes
of religious biography, can have perused (for instance) the lives of
Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, Wishart, Sir Thomas More, Bernard Gilpin,
Bishop Bedel, or of Egede, Swartz, and the missionaries of the frozen
world, without an occasional conviction, that these men lived under
extraordinary influences, which in each instance and in all ages of
the Christian æra bear the same characters, and both in the
accompaniments and the results evidently refer to a common origin. And
what can this be? is the question that must needs force itself on the
mind in the first moment of reflection on a phenomenon so interesting
and apparently so anomalous. The answer is as necessarily contained in
one or the other of two assumptions. These influences are either the
Product of Delusion (_insania amabilis_, and the re-action of
disordered nerves), or they argue the existence of a relation to some
real agency, distinct from what is experienced or acknowledged by the
world at large, for which as not merely _natural_ on the one hand, and
yet not assumed to be _miraculous_[55] on the other, we have no apter
name than _spiritual_. Now if neither analogy justifies nor the moral
feelings permit the former assumption, and we decide therefore in
favour of the reality of a State other and higher than the mere Moral
Man, whose Religion[56] consists in Morality, has attained under these
convictions, can the existence of a _transitional_ state appear other
than probable? or that these very convictions, when accompanied by
correspondent dispositions and stirrings of the heart, are among the
marks and indications of such a state? And thinking it not unlikely
that among the readers of this volume, there may be found some
Individuals, whose inward state, though disquieted by doubts and
oftener still perhaps by blank misgivings, may, nevertheless, betoken
the commencement of a Transition from a not irreligious Morality to a
Spiritual Religion, with a view to their interests I placed this
Aphorism under the present head.
[55] In check of fanatical pretensions, it is expedient to confine the
term _miraculous_, to cases where the _senses_ are appealed to in
proof of something that transcends, or can be a part of the Experience
derived from the senses.
[56] For let it not be forgotten, that Morality, as distinguished from
Prudence, implying (it matters not under what name, whether of Honour,
or Duty, or Conscience, still, I say, implying), and being grounded
in, an awe of the Invisible and a Confidence therein beyond (nay,
occasionally in apparent contradiction to) the inductions of outward
Experience, is essentially religious.