mind‐cure movement and the Lutheran and Wesleyan movements. To the
believer in moralism and works, with his anxious query, “What shall I do
to be saved?” Luther and Wesley replied: “You are saved now, if you would
but believe it.” And the mind‐curers come with precisely similar words of
emancipation. They speak, it is true, to persons for whom the conception
of salvation has lost its ancient theological meaning, but who labor
nevertheless with the same eternal human difficulty. _Things are wrong
with them_; and “What shall I do to be clear, right, sound, whole, well?”
is the form of their question. And the answer is: “You _are_ well, sound,
and clear already, if you did but know it.” “The whole matter may be
summed up in one sentence,” says one of the authors whom I have already
quoted, “_God is well, and so are you_. You must awaken to the knowledge
of your real being.”
The adequacy of their message to the mental needs of a large fraction of
mankind is what gave force to those earlier gospels. Exactly the same
adequacy holds in the case of the mind‐cure message, foolish as it may
sound upon its surface; and seeing its rapid growth in influence, and its
therapeutic triumphs, one is tempted to ask whether it may not be destined
(probably by very reason of the crudity and extravagance of many of its
manifestations(53)) to play a part almost as great in the evolution of the
popular religion of the future as did those earlier movements in their
day.
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But I here fear that I may begin to “jar upon the nerves” of some of the
members of this academic audience. Such contemporary vagaries, you may
think, should hardly take so large a place in dignified Gifford lectures.
I can only beseech you to have patience. The whole outcome of these
lectures will, I imagine, be the emphasizing to your mind of the enormous
diversities which the spiritual lives of different men exhibit. Their
wants, their susceptibilities, and their capacities all vary and must be
classed under different heads. The result is that we have really different
types of religious experience; and, seeking in these lectures closer
acquaintance with the healthy‐minded type, we must take it where we find
it in most radical form. The psychology of individual types of character
has hardly begun even to be sketched as yet—our lectures may possibly
serve as a crumb‐like contribution to the structure. The first thing to
bear in mind (especially if we ourselves belong to the clerico‐academic‐
scientific type, the officially and conventionally “correct” type, “the
deadly respectable” type, for which to ignore others is a besetting
temptation) is that nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena
from our notice, merely because we are incapable of taking part in
anything like them ourselves.
Now the history of Lutheran salvation by faith, of methodistic
conversions, and of what I call the mind‐cure movement seems to prove the
existence of numerous persons in whom—at any rate at a certain stage in
their development—a change of character for the better, so far from being
facilitated by the rules laid down by official moralists, will take place
all the more successfully if those rules be exactly reversed. Official
moralists advise us never to relax our strenuousness. “Be vigilant, day
and night,” they adjure us; “hold your passive tendencies in check; shrink
from no effort; keep your will like a bow always bent.” But the persons I
speak of find that all this conscious effort leads to nothing but failure
and vexation in their hands, and only makes them two‐fold more the
children of hell they were before. The tense and voluntary attitude
becomes in them an impossible fever and torment. Their machinery refuses
to run at all when the bearings are made so hot and the belts so tight.
Under these circumstances the way to success, as vouched for by
innumerable authentic personal narrations, is by an anti‐moralistic
method, by the “surrender” of which I spoke in my second lecture.
Passivity, not activity; relaxation, not intentness, should be now the
rule. Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the
care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what
becomes of it all, and you will find not only that you gain a perfect
inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you
sincerely thought you were renouncing. This is the salvation through self‐
despair, the dying to be truly born, of Lutheran theology, the passage
into _nothing_ of which Jacob Behmen writes. To get to it, a critical
point must usually be passed, a corner turned within one. Something must
give way, a native hardness must break down and liquefy; and this event
(as we shall abundantly see hereafter) is frequently sudden and automatic,
and leaves on the Subject an impression that he has been wrought on by an
external power.
Whatever its ultimate significance may prove to be, this is certainly one
fundamental form of human experience. Some say that the capacity or
incapacity for it is what divides the religious from the merely moralistic
character. With those who undergo it in its fullness, no criticism avails
to cast doubt on its reality. They _know_; for they have actually _felt_
the higher powers, in giving up the tension of their personal will.
A story which revivalist preachers often tell is that of a man who found
himself at night slipping down the side of a precipice. At last he caught
a branch which stopped his fall, and remained clinging to it in misery for
hours. But finally his fingers had to loose their hold, and with a
despairing farewell to life, he let himself drop. He fell just six inches.
If he had given up the struggle earlier, his agony would have been spared.
As the mother earth received him, so, the preachers tell us, will the
everlasting arms receive _us_ if we confide absolutely in them, and give
up the hereditary habit of relying on our personal strength, with its
precautions that cannot shelter and safeguards that never save.
The mind‐curers have given the widest scope to this sort of experience.
They have demonstrated that a form of regeneration by relaxing, by letting
go, psychologically indistinguishable from the Lutheran justification by
faith and the Wesleyan acceptance of free grace, is within the reach of
persons who have no conviction of sin and care nothing for the Lutheran
theology. It is but giving your little private convulsive self a rest, and
finding that a greater Self is there. The results, slow or sudden, or
great or small, of the combined optimism and expectancy, the regenerative
phenomena which ensue on the abandonment of effort, remain firm facts of
human nature, no matter whether we adopt a theistic, a pantheistic‐
idealistic, or a medical‐materialistic view of their ultimate causal
explanation.(54)
When we take up the phenomena of revivalistic conversion, we shall learn
something more about all this. Meanwhile I will say a brief word about the
mind‐curer’s _methods_.
They are of course largely suggestive. The suggestive influence of
environment plays an enormous part in all spiritual education. But the
word “suggestion,” having acquired official status, is unfortunately
already beginning to play in many quarters the part of a wet blanket upon
investigation, being used to fend off all inquiry into the varying
susceptibilities of individual cases. “Suggestion” is only another name
for the power of ideas, _so far as they prove efficacious over belief and
conduct_. Ideas efficacious over some people prove inefficacious over
others. Ideas efficacious at some times and in some human surroundings are
not so at other times and elsewhere. The ideas of Christian churches are
not efficacious in the therapeutic direction to‐day, whatever they may
have been in earlier centuries; and when the whole question is as to why
the salt has lost its savor here or gained it there, the mere blank waving
of the word “suggestion” as if it were a banner gives no light. Dr.
Goddard, whose candid psychological essay on Faith Cures ascribes them to
nothing but ordinary suggestion, concludes by saying that “Religion [and
by this he seems to mean our popular Christianity] has in it all there is
in mental therapeutics, and has it in its best form. Living up to [our
religious] ideas will do anything for us that can be done.” And this in
spite of the actual fact that the popular Christianity does absolutely
_nothing_, or did nothing until mind‐cure came to the rescue.(55)
An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of a
revelation. The mind‐cure with its gospel of healthy‐mindedness has come
as a revelation to many whose hearts the church Christianity had left
hardened. It has let loose their springs of higher life. In what can the
originality of any religious movement consist, save in finding a channel,
until then sealed up, through which those springs may be set free in some
group of human beings?
The force of personal faith, enthusiasm, and example, and above all the
force of novelty, are always the prime suggestive agency in this kind of
success. If mind‐cure should ever become official, respectable, and
intrenched, these elements of suggestive efficacy will be lost. In its
acuter stages every religion must be a homeless Arab of the desert. The
church knows this well enough, with its everlasting inner struggle of the
acute religion of the few against the chronic religion of the many,
indurated into an obstructiveness worse than that which irreligion opposes
to the movings of the Spirit. “We may pray,” says Jonathan Edwards,
“concerning all those saints that are not lively Christians, that they may
either be enlivened, or taken away; if that be true that is often said by
some at this day, that these cold dead saints do more hurt than natural
men, and lead more souls to hell, and that it would be well for mankind if
they were all dead.”(56)
The next condition of success is the apparent existence, in large numbers,
of minds who unite healthy‐mindedness with readiness for regeneration by
letting go. Protestantism has been too pessimistic as regards the natural
man, Catholicism has been too legalistic and moralistic, for either the
one or the other to appeal in any generous way to the type of character
formed of this peculiar mingling of elements. However few of us here
present may belong to such a type, it is now evident that it forms a
specific moral combination, well represented in the world.
Finally, mind‐cure has made what in our protestant countries is an
unprecedentedly great use of the subconscious life. To their reasoned
advice and dogmatic assertion, its founders have added systematic exercise
in passive relaxation, concentration, and meditation, and have even
invoked something like hypnotic practice. I quote some passages at
random:—
“The value, the potency of ideals is the great practical truth on
which the New Thought most strongly insists,—the development
namely from within outward, from small to great.(57) Consequently
one’s thought should be centred on the ideal outcome, even though
this trust be literally like a step in the dark.(58) To attain the
ability thus effectively to direct the mind, the New Thought
advises the practice of concentration, or in other words, the
attainment of self‐control. One is to learn to marshal the
tendencies of the mind, so that they may be held together as a
unit by the chosen ideal. To this end, one should set apart times
for silent meditation, by one’s self, preferably in a room where
the surroundings are favorable to spiritual thought. In New
Thought terms, this is called ‘entering the silence.’ ”(59)
“The time will come when in the busy office or on the noisy street
you can enter into the silence by simply drawing the mantle of
your own thoughts about you and realizing that there and
everywhere the Spirit of Infinite Life, Love, Wisdom, Peace,
Power, and Plenty is guiding, keeping, protecting, leading you.
This is the spirit of continual prayer.(60) One of the most
intuitive men we ever met had a desk at a city office where
several other gentlemen were doing business constantly, and often
talking loudly. Entirely undisturbed by the many various sounds
about him, this self‐centred faithful man would, in any moment of
perplexity, draw the curtains of privacy so completely about him
that he would be as fully inclosed in his own psychic aura, and
thereby as effectually removed from all distractions, as though he
were alone in some primeval wood. Taking his difficulty with him
into the mystic silence in the form of a direct question, to which
he expected a certain answer, he would remain utterly passive
until the reply came, and never once through many years’
experience did he find himself disappointed or misled.”(61)
Wherein, I should like to know, does this _intrinsically_ differ from the
practice of “recollection” which plays so great a part in Catholic
discipline? Otherwise called the practice of the presence of God (and so
known among ourselves, as for instance in Jeremy Taylor), it is thus
defined by the eminent teacher Alvarez de Paz in his work on
Contemplation.
“It is the recollection of God, the thought of God, which in all
places and circumstances makes us see him present, lets us commune
respectfully and lovingly with him, and fills us with desire and
affection for him.... Would you escape from every ill? Never lose
this recollection of God, neither in prosperity nor in adversity,
nor on any occasion whichsoever it be. Invoke not, to excuse
yourself from this duty, either the difficulty or the importance
of your business, for you can always remember that God sees you,
that you are under his eye. If a thousand times an hour you forget
him, reanimate a thousand times the recollection. If you cannot
practice this exercise continuously, at least make yourself as
familiar with it as possible; and, like unto those who in a
rigorous winter draw near the fire as often as they can, go as
often as you can to that ardent fire which will warm your
soul.”(62)
All the external associations of the Catholic discipline are of course
unlike anything in mind‐cure thought, but the purely spiritual part of the
exercise is identical in both communions, and in both communions those who
urge it write with authority, for they have evidently experienced in their
own persons that whereof they tell. Compare again some mind‐cure
utterances:—
“High, healthful, pure thinking can be encouraged, promoted, and
strengthened. Its current can be turned upon grand ideals until it
forms a habit and wears a channel. By means of such discipline the
mental horizon can be flooded with the sunshine of beauty,
wholeness, and harmony. To inaugurate pure and lofty thinking may
at first seem difficult, even almost mechanical, but perseverance
will at length render it easy, then pleasant, and finally
delightful.
“The soul’s real world is that which it has built of its thoughts,
mental states, and imaginations. If we _will_, we can turn our
backs upon the lower and sensuous plane, and lift ourselves into
the realm of the spiritual and Real, and there gain a residence.
The assumption of states of expectancy and receptivity will
attract spiritual sunshine, and it will flow in as naturally as
air inclines to a vacuum.... Whenever the thought is not occupied
with one’s daily duty or profession, it should be sent aloft into
the spiritual atmosphere. There are quiet leisure moments by day,
and wakeful hours at night, when this wholesome and delightful
exercise may be engaged in to great advantage. If one who has
never made any systematic effort to lift and control the thought‐
forces will, for a single month, earnestly pursue the course here
suggested, he will be surprised and delighted at the result, and
nothing will induce him to go back to careless, aimless, and
superficial thinking. At such favorable seasons the outside world,
with all its current of daily events, is barred out, and one goes
into the silent sanctuary of the inner temple of soul to commune
and aspire. The spiritual hearing becomes delicately sensitive, so
that the ‘still, small voice’ is audible, the tumultuous waves of
external sense are hushed, and there is a great calm. The ego
gradually becomes conscious that it is face to face with the
Divine Presence; that mighty, healing, loving, Fatherly life which
is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. There is soul‐contact
with the Parent‐Soul, and an influx of life, love, virtue, health,
and happiness from the Inexhaustible Fountain.”(63)
When we reach the subject of mysticism, you will undergo so deep an
immersion into these exalted states of consciousness as to be wet all
over, if I may so express myself; and the cold shiver of doubt with which
this little sprinkling may affect you will have long since passed
away—doubt, I mean, as to whether all such writing be not mere abstract
talk and rhetoric set down _pour encourager les autres_. You will then be
convinced, I trust, that these states of consciousness of “union” form a
perfectly definite class of experiences, of which the soul may
occasionally partake, and which certain persons may live by in a deeper
sense than they live by anything else with which they have acquaintance.
This brings me to a general philosophical reflection with which I should
like to pass from the subject of healthy‐mindedness, and close a topic
which I fear is already only too long drawn out. It concerns the relation
of all this systematized healthy‐mindedness and mind‐cure religion to
scientific method and the scientific life.
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In a later lecture I shall have to treat explicitly of the relation of
religion to science on the one hand, and to primeval savage thought on the
other. There are plenty of persons to‐day—“scientists” or “positivists,”
they are fond of calling themselves—who will tell you that religious
thought is a mere survival, an atavistic reversion to a type of
consciousness which humanity in its more enlightened examples has long
since left behind and outgrown. If you ask them to explain themselves more
fully, they will probably say that for primitive thought everything is
conceived of under the form of personality. The savage thinks that things
operate by personal forces, and for the sake of individual ends. For him,
even external nature obeys individual needs and claims, just as if these
were so many elementary powers. Now science, on the other hand, these
positivists say, has proved that personality, so far from being an
elementary force in nature, is but a passive resultant of the really
elementary forces, physical, chemical, physiological, and psycho‐physical,
which are all impersonal and general in character. Nothing individual
accomplishes anything in the universe save in so far as it obeys and
exemplifies some universal law. Should you then inquire of them by what
means science has thus supplanted primitive thought, and discredited its
personal way of looking at things, they would undoubtedly say it has been
by the strict use of the method of experimental verification. Follow out
science’s conceptions practically, they will say, the conceptions that
ignore personality altogether, and you will always be corroborated. The
world is so made that all your expectations will be experientially
verified so long, and only so long, as you keep the terms from which you
infer them impersonal and universal.
But here we have mind‐cure, with her diametrically opposite philosophy,
setting up an exactly identical claim. Live as if I were true, she says,
and every day will practically prove you right. That the controlling
energies of nature are personal, that your own personal thoughts are
forces, that the powers of the universe will directly respond to your
individual appeals and needs, are propositions which your whole bodily and
mental experience will verify. And that experience does largely verify
these primeval religious ideas is proved by the fact that the mind‐cure
movement spreads as it does, not by proclamation and assertion simply, but
by palpable experiential results. Here, in the very heyday of science’s
authority, it carries on an aggressive warfare against the scientific
philosophy, and succeeds by using science’s own peculiar methods and
weapons. Believing that a higher power will take care of us in certain
ways better than we can take care of ourselves, if we only genuinely throw
ourselves upon it and consent to use it, it finds the belief, not only not
impugned, but corroborated by its observation.
How conversions are thus made, and converts confirmed, is evident enough
from the narratives which I have quoted. I will quote yet another couple
of shorter ones to give the matter a perfectly concrete turn. Here is
one:—
“One of my first experiences in applying my teaching was two
months after I first saw the healer. I fell, spraining my right
ankle, which I had done once four years before, having then had to
use a crutch and elastic anklet for some months, and carefully
guarding it ever since. As soon as I was on my feet I made the
positive suggestion (and felt it through all my being): ‘There is
nothing but God, all life comes from him perfectly. I cannot be
sprained or hurt, I will let him take care of it.’ Well, I never
had a sensation in it, and I walked two miles that day.”
The next case not only illustrates experiment and verification, but also
the element of passivity and surrender of which awhile ago I made such
account.
“I went into town to do some shopping one morning, and I had not
been gone long before I began to feel ill. The ill feeling
increased rapidly, until I had pains in all my bones, nausea and
faintness, headache, all the symptoms in short that precede an
attack of influenza. I thought that I was going to have the
grippe, epidemic then in Boston, or something worse. The mind‐cure
teachings that I had been listening to all the winter thereupon
came into my mind, and I thought that here was an opportunity to
test myself. On my way home I met a friend, and I refrained with
some effort from telling her how I felt. That was the first step
gained. I went to bed immediately, and my husband wished to send
for the doctor. But I told him that I would rather wait until
morning and see how I felt. Then followed one of the most
beautiful experiences of my life.
“I cannot express it in any other way than to say that I did ‘lie
down in the stream of life and let it flow over me.’ I gave up all
fear of any impending disease; I was perfectly willing and
obedient. There was no intellectual effort, or train of thought.
My dominant idea was: ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it unto
me even as thou wilt,’ and a perfect confidence that all would be
well, that all _was_ well. The creative life was flowing into me
every instant, and I felt myself allied with the Infinite, in
harmony, and full of the peace that passeth understanding. There
was no place in my mind for a jarring body. I had no consciousness
of time or space or persons; but only of love and happiness and
faith.
“I do not know how long this state lasted, nor when I fell asleep;
but when I woke up in the morning, _I was well_.”
These are exceedingly trivial instances,(64) but in them, if we have
anything at all, we have the method of experiment and verification. For
the point I am driving at now, it makes no difference whether you consider
the patients to be deluded victims of their imagination or not. That they
seemed to _themselves_ to have been cured by the experiments tried was
enough to make them converts to the system. And although it is evident
that one must be of a certain mental mould to get such results (for not
every one can get thus cured to his own satisfaction any more than every
one can be cured by the first regular practitioner whom he calls in), yet
it would surely be pedantic and over‐scrupulous for those who _can_ get
their savage and primitive philosophy of mental healing verified in such
experimental ways as this, to give them up at word of command for more
scientific therapeutics. What are we to think of all this? Has science
made too wide a claim?