me. I have stood upon the Mount of Vision since, and felt the
Eternal round about me. But never since has there come quite the
same stirring of the heart. Then, if ever, I believe, I stood face
to face with God, and was born anew of his spirit. There was, as I
recall it, no sudden change of thought or of belief, except that
my early crude conception had, as it were, burst into flower.
There was no destruction of the old, but a rapid, wonderful
unfolding. Since that time no discussion that I have heard of the
proofs of God’s existence has been able to shake my faith. Having
once felt the presence of God’s spirit, I have never lost it again
for long. My most assuring evidence of his existence is deeply
rooted in that hour of vision, in the memory of that supreme
experience, and in the conviction, gained from reading and
reflection, that something the same has come to all who have found
God. I am aware that it may justly be called mystical. I am not
enough acquainted with philosophy to defend it from that or any
other charge. I feel that in writing of it I have overlaid it with
words rather than put it clearly to your thought. But, such as it
is, I have described it as carefully as I now am able to do.”
Here is another document, even more definite in character, which, the
writer being a Swiss, I translate from the French original.(29)
“I was in perfect health: we were on our sixth day of tramping,
and in good training. We had come the day before from Sixt to
Trient by Buet. I felt neither fatigue, hunger, nor thirst, and my
state of mind was equally healthy. I had had at Forlaz good news
from home; I was subject to no anxiety, either near or remote, for
we had a good guide, and there was not a shadow of uncertainty
about the road we should follow. I can best describe the condition
in which I was by calling it a state of equilibrium. When all at
once I experienced a feeling of being raised above myself, I felt
the presence of God—I tell of the thing just as I was conscious of
it—as if his goodness and his power were penetrating me
altogether. The throb of emotion was so violent that I could
barely tell the boys to pass on and not wait for me. I then sat
down on a stone, unable to stand any longer, and my eyes
overflowed with tears. I thanked God that in the course of my life
he had taught me to know him, that he sustained my life and took
pity both on the insignificant creature and on the sinner that I
was. I begged him ardently that my life might be consecrated to
the doing of his will. I felt his reply, which was that I should
do his will from day to day, in humility and poverty, leaving him,
the Almighty God, to be judge of whether I should some time be
called to bear witness more conspicuously. Then, slowly, the
ecstasy left my heart; that is, I felt that God had withdrawn the
communion which he had granted, and I was able to walk on, but
very slowly, so strongly was I still possessed by the interior
emotion. Besides, I had wept uninterruptedly for several minutes,
my eyes were swollen, and I did not wish my companions to see me.
The state of ecstasy may have lasted four or five minutes,
although it seemed at the time to last much longer. My comrades
waited for me ten minutes at the cross of Barine, but I took about
twenty‐five or thirty minutes to join them, for as well as I can
remember, they said that I had kept them back for about half an
hour. The impression had been so profound that in climbing slowly
the slope I asked myself if it were possible that Moses on Sinai
could have had a more intimate communication with God. I think it
well to add that in this ecstasy of mine God had neither form,
color, odor, nor taste; moreover, that the feeling of his presence
was accompanied with no determinate localization. It was rather as
if my personality had been transformed by the presence of a
_spiritual spirit_. But the more I seek words to express this
intimate intercourse, the more I feel the impossibility of
describing the thing by any of our usual images. At bottom the
expression most apt to render what I felt is this: God was
present, though invisible; he fell under no one of my senses, yet
my consciousness perceived him.”
The adjective “mystical” is technically applied, most often, to states
that are of brief duration. Of course such hours of rapture as the last
two persons describe are mystical experiences, of which in a later lecture
I shall have much to say. Meanwhile here is the abridged record of another
mystical or semi‐mystical experience, in a mind evidently framed by nature
for ardent piety. I owe it to Starbuck’s collection. The lady who gives
the account is the daughter of a man well known in his time as a writer
against Christianity. The suddenness of her conversion shows well how
native the sense of God’s presence must be to certain minds. She relates
that she was brought up in entire ignorance of Christian doctrine, but,
when in Germany, after being talked to by Christian friends, she read the
Bible and prayed, and finally the plan of salvation flashed upon her like
a stream of light.
“To this day,” she writes, “I cannot understand dallying with
religion and the commands of God. The very instant I heard my
Father’s cry calling unto me, my heart bounded in recognition. I
ran, I stretched forth my arms, I cried aloud, ‘Here, here I am,
my Father.’ Oh, happy child, what should I do? ‘Love me,’ answered
my God. ‘I do, I do,’ I cried passionately. ‘Come unto me,’ called
my Father. ‘I will,’ my heart panted. Did I stop to ask a single
question? Not one. It never occurred to me to ask whether I was
good enough, or to hesitate over my unfitness, or to find out what
I thought of his church, or ... to wait until I should be
satisfied. Satisfied! I was satisfied. Had I not found my God and
my Father? Did he not love me? Had he not called me? Was there not
a Church into which I might enter?... Since then I have had direct
answers to prayer—so significant as to be almost like talking with
God and hearing his answer. The idea of God’s reality has never
left me for one moment.”
Here is still another case, the writer being a man aged twenty‐seven, in
which the experience, probably almost as characteristic, is less vividly
described:—
“I have on a number of occasions felt that I had enjoyed a period
of intimate communion with the divine. These meetings came unasked
and unexpected, and seemed to consist merely in the temporary
obliteration of the conventionalities which usually surround and
cover my life.... Once it was when from the summit of a high
mountain I looked over a gashed and corrugated landscape extending
to a long convex of ocean that ascended to the horizon, and again
from the same point when I could see nothing beneath me but a
boundless expanse of white cloud, on the blown surface of which a
few high peaks, including the one I was on, seemed plunging about
as if they were dragging their anchors. What I felt on these
occasions was a temporary loss of my own identity, accompanied by
an illumination which revealed to me a deeper significance than I
had been wont to attach to life. It is in this that I find my
justification for saying that I have enjoyed communication with
God. Of course the absence of such a being as this would be chaos.
I cannot conceive of life without its presence.”
Of the more habitual and so to speak chronic sense of God’s presence the
following sample from Professor Starbuck’s manuscript collection may serve
to give an idea. It is from a man aged forty‐nine,—probably thousands of
unpretending Christians would write an almost identical account.
“God is more real to me than any thought or thing or person. I
feel his presence positively, and the more as I live in closer
harmony with his laws as written in my body and mind. I feel him
in the sunshine or rain; and awe mingled with a delicious
restfulness most nearly describes my feelings. I talk to him as to
a companion in prayer and praise, and our communion is delightful.
He answers me again and again, often in words so clearly spoken
that it seems my outer ear must have carried the tone, but
generally in strong mental impressions. Usually a text of
Scripture, unfolding some new view of him and his love for me, and
care for my safety. I could give hundreds of instances, in school
matters, social problems, financial difficulties, etc. That he is
mine and I am his never leaves me, it is an abiding joy. Without
it life would be a blank, a desert, a shoreless, trackless waste.”
I subjoin some more examples from writers of different ages and sexes.
They are also from Professor Starbuck’s collection, and their number might
be greatly multiplied. The first is from a man twenty‐seven years old:—
“God is quite real to me. I talk to him and often get answers.
Thoughts sudden and distinct from any I have been entertaining
come to my mind after asking God for his direction. Something over
a year ago I was for some weeks in the direst perplexity. When the
trouble first appeared before me I was dazed, but before long (two
or three hours) I could hear distinctly a passage of Scripture:
‘My grace is sufficient for thee.’ Every time my thoughts turned
to the trouble I could hear this quotation. I don’t think I ever
doubted the existence of God, or had him drop out of my
consciousness. God has frequently stepped into my affairs very
perceptibly, and I feel that he directs many little details all
the time. But on two or three occasions he has ordered ways for me
very contrary to my ambitions and plans.”
Another statement (none the less valuable psychologically for being so
decidedly childish) is that of a boy of seventeen:—
“Sometimes as I go to church, I sit down, join in the service, and
before I go out I feel as if God was with me, right side of me,
singing and reading the Psalms with me.... And then again I feel
as if I could sit beside him, and put my arms around him, kiss
him, etc. When I am taking Holy Communion at the altar, I try to
get with him and generally feel his presence.”
I let a few other cases follow at random:—
“God surrounds me like the physical atmosphere. He is closer to me
than my own breath. In him literally I live and move and have my
being.”—
“There are times when I seem to stand, in his very presence, to
talk with him. Answers to prayer have come, sometimes direct and
overwhelming in their revelation of his presence and powers. There
are times when God seems far off, but this is always my own
fault.”—
“I have the sense of a presence, strong, and at the same time
soothing, which hovers over me. Sometimes it seems to enwrap me
with sustaining arms.”
Such is the human ontological imagination, and such is the convincingness
of what it brings to birth. Unpicturable beings are realized, and realized
with an intensity almost like that of an hallucination. They determine our
vital attitude as decisively as the vital attitude of lovers is determined
by the habitual sense, by which each is haunted, of the other being in the
world. A lover has notoriously this sense of the continuous being of his
idol, even when his attention is addressed to other matters and he no
longer represents her features. He cannot forget her; she uninterruptedly
affects him through and through.
I spoke of the convincingness of these feelings of reality, and I must
dwell a moment longer on that point. They are as convincing to those who
have them as any direct sensible experiences can be, and they are, as a
rule, much more convincing than results established by mere logic ever
are. One may indeed be entirely without them; probably more than one of
you here present is without them in any marked degree; but if you do have
them, and have them at all strongly, the probability is that you cannot
help regarding them as genuine perceptions of truth, as revelations of a
kind of reality which no adverse argument, however unanswerable by you in
words, can expel from your belief. The opinion opposed to mysticism in
philosophy is sometimes spoken of as _rationalism_. Rationalism insists
that all our beliefs ought ultimately to find for themselves articulate
grounds. Such grounds, for rationalism, must consist of four things: (1)
definitely statable abstract principles; (2) definite facts of sensation;
(3) definite hypotheses based on such facts; and (4) definite inferences
logically drawn. Vague impressions of something indefinable have no place
in the rationalistic system, which on its positive side is surely a
splendid intellectual tendency, for not only are all our philosophies
fruits of it, but physical science (amongst other good things) is its
result.
Nevertheless, if we look on man’s whole mental life as it exists, on the
life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science, and
that they inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part
of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial.
It is the part that has the _prestige_ undoubtedly, for it has the
loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you
down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same,
if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions. If you have
intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the
loquacious level which rationalism inhabits. Your whole subconscious life,
your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared
the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the
result; and something in you absolutely _knows_ that that result must be
truer than any logic‐chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may
contradict it. This inferiority of the rationalistic level in founding
belief is just as manifest when rationalism argues for religion as when it
argues against it. That vast literature of proofs of God’s existence drawn
from the order of nature, which a century ago seemed so overwhelmingly
convincing, to‐day does little more than gather dust in libraries, for the
simple reason that our generation has ceased to believe in the kind of God
it argued for. Whatever sort of a being God may be, we _know_ to‐day that
he is nevermore that mere external inventor of “contrivances” intended to
make manifest his “glory” in which our great‐grandfathers took such
satisfaction, though just how we know this we cannot possibly make clear
by words either to others or to ourselves. I defy any of you here fully to
account for your persuasion that if a God exist he must be a more cosmic
and tragic personage than that Being.
The truth is that in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate
reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality
have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion. Then, indeed,
our intuitions and our reason work together, and great world‐ruling
systems, like that of the Buddhist or of the Catholic philosophy, may grow
up. Our impulsive belief is here always what sets up the original body of
truth, and our articulately verbalized philosophy is but its showy
translation into formulas. The unreasoned and immediate assurance is the
deep thing in us, the reasoned argument is but a surface exhibition.
Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow. If a person feels the
presence of a living God after the fashion shown by my quotations, your
critical arguments, be they never so superior, will vainly set themselves
to change his faith.
Please observe, however, that I do not yet say that it is _better_ that
the subconscious and non‐rational should thus hold primacy in the
religious realm. I confine myself to simply pointing out that they do so
hold it as a matter of fact.
So much for our sense of the reality of the religious objects. Let me now
say a brief word more about the attitudes they characteristically awaken.
We have already agreed that they are _solemn_; and we have seen reason to
think that the most distinctive of them is the sort of joy which may
result in extreme cases from absolute self‐surrender. The sense of the
kind of object to which the surrender is made has much to do with
determining the precise complexion of the joy; and the whole phenomenon is
more complex than any simple formula allows. In the literature of the
subject, sadness and gladness have each been emphasized in turn. The
ancient saying that the first maker of the Gods was fear receives
voluminous corroboration from every age of religious history; but none the
less does religious history show the part which joy has evermore tended to
play. Sometimes the joy has been primary; sometimes secondary, being the
gladness of deliverance from the fear. This latter state of things, being
the more complex, is also the more complete; and as we proceed, I think we
shall have abundant reason for refusing to leave out either the sadness or
the gladness, if we look at religion with the breadth of view which it
demands. Stated in the completest possible terms, a man’s religion
involves both moods of contraction and moods of expansion of his being.
But the quantitative mixture and order of these moods vary so much from
one age of the world, from one system of thought, and from one individual
to another, that you may insist either on the dread and the submission, or
on the peace and the freedom as the essence of the matter, and still
remain materially within the limits of the truth. The constitutionally
sombre and the constitutionally sanguine onlooker are bound to emphasize
opposite aspects of what lies before their eyes.
The constitutionally sombre religious person makes even of his religious
peace a very sober thing. Danger still hovers in the air about it. Flexion
and contraction are not wholly checked. It were sparrowlike and childish
after our deliverance to explode into twittering laughter and caper‐
cutting, and utterly to forget the imminent hawk on bough. Lie low,
rather, lie low; for you are in the hands of a living God. In the Book of
Job, for example, the impotence of man and the omnipotence of God is the
exclusive burden of its author’s mind. “It is as high as heaven; what
canst thou do?—deeper than hell; what canst thou know?” There is an
astringent relish about the truth of this conviction which some men can
feel, and which for them is as near an approach as can be made to the
feeling of religious joy.
“In Job,” says that coldly truthful writer, the author of Mark
Rutherford, “God reminds us that man is not the measure of his
creation. The world is immense, constructed on no plan or theory
which the intellect of man can grasp. It is _transcendent_
everywhere. This is the burden of every verse, and is the secret,
if there be one, of the poem. Sufficient or insufficient, there is
nothing more.... God is great, we know not his ways. He takes from
us all we have, but yet if we possess our souls in patience, we
_may_ pass the valley of the shadow, and come out in sunlight
again. We may or we may not!... What more have we to say now than
God said from the whirlwind over two thousand five hundred years
ago?”(30)
If we turn to the sanguine onlooker, on the other hand, we find that
deliverance is felt as incomplete unless the burden be altogether overcome
and the danger forgotten. Such onlookers give us definitions that seem to
the sombre minds of whom we have just been speaking to leave out all the
solemnity that makes religious peace so different from merely animal joys.
In the opinion of some writers an attitude might be called religious,
though no touch were left in it of sacrifice or submission, no tendency to
flexion, no bowing of the head. Any “habitual and regulated admiration,”
says Professor J. R. Seeley,(31) “is worthy to be called a religion”; and
accordingly he thinks that our Music, our Science, and our so‐called
“Civilization,” as these things are now organized and admiringly believed
in, form the more genuine religions of our time. Certainly the
unhesitating and unreasoning way in which we feel that we must inflict our
civilization upon “lower” races, by means of Hotchkiss guns, etc., reminds
one of nothing so much as of the early spirit of Islam spreading its
religion by the sword.
In my last lecture I quoted to you the ultra‐radical opinion of Mr.
Havelock Ellis, that laughter of any sort may be considered a religious
exercise, for it bears witness to the soul’s emancipation. I quoted this
opinion in order to deny its adequacy. But we must now settle our scores
more carefully with this whole optimistic way of thinking. It is far too
complex to be decided off‐hand. I propose accordingly that we make of
religious optimism the theme of the next two lectures.
LECTURES IV AND V. THE RELIGION OF HEALTHY‐MINDEDNESS.
If we were to ask the question: “What is human life’s chief concern?” one
of the answers we should receive would be: “It is happiness.” How to gain,
how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all
times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to
endure. The hedonistic school in ethics deduces the moral life wholly from
the experiences of happiness and unhappiness which different kinds of
conduct bring; and, even more in the religious life than in the moral
life, happiness and unhappiness seem to be the poles round which the
interest revolves. We need not go so far as to say with the author whom I
lately quoted that any persistent enthusiasm is, as such, religion, nor
need we call mere laughter a religious exercise; but we must admit that
any persistent enjoyment may _produce_ the sort of religion which consists
in a grateful admiration of the gift of so happy an existence; and we must
also acknowledge that the more complex ways of experiencing religion are
new manners of producing happiness, wonderful inner paths to a
supernatural kind of happiness, when the first gift of natural existence
is unhappy, as it so often proves itself to be.
With such relations between religion and happiness, it is perhaps not
surprising that men come to regard the happiness which a religious belief
affords as a proof of its truth. If a creed makes a man feel happy, he
almost inevitably adopts it. Such a belief ought to be true; therefore it
is true—such, rightly or wrongly, is one of the “immediate inferences” of
the religious logic used by ordinary men.
“The near presence of God’s spirit,” says a German writer,(32)
“may be experienced in its reality—indeed _only_ experienced. And
the mark by which the spirit’s existence and nearness are made
irrefutably clear to those who have ever had the experience is the
utterly incomparable _feeling of happiness_ which is connected
with the nearness, and which is therefore not only a possible and
altogether proper feeling for us to have here below, but is the
best and most indispensable proof of God’s reality. No other proof
is equally convincing, and therefore happiness is the point from
which every efficacious new theology should start.”
In the hour immediately before us, I shall invite you to consider the
simpler kinds of religious happiness, leaving the more complex sorts to be
treated on a later day.