phenomenon of grace must still appear sufficiently extraordinary, eminent,
and rare, both in its nature and in its effects, to deserve a closer
study. For the soul arrives thereby at a certain fixed and invincible
state, a state which is genuinely heroic, and from out of which the
greatest deeds which it ever performs are executed. Through all the
different forms of communion, and all the diversity of the means which
help to produce this state, whether it be reached by a jubilee, by a
general confession, by a solitary prayer and effusion, whatever in short
be the place and the occasion, it is easy to recognize that it is
fundamentally one state in spirit and in fruits. Penetrate a little
beneath the diversity of circumstances, and it becomes evident that in
Christians of different epochs it is always one and the same modification
by which they are affected: there is veritably a single fundamental and
identical spirit of piety and charity, common to those who have received
grace; an inner state which before all things is one of love and humility,
of infinite confidence in God, and of severity for one’s self, accompanied
with tenderness for others. The fruits peculiar to this condition of the
soul have the same savor in all, under distant suns and in different
surroundings, in Saint Teresa of Avila just as in any Moravian brother of
Herrnhut.”(142)
Sainte‐Beuve has here only the more eminent instances of regeneration in
mind, and these are of course the instructive ones for us also to
consider. These devotees have often laid their course so differently from
other men that, judging them by worldly law, we might be tempted to call
them monstrous aberrations from the path of nature. I begin, therefore, by
asking a general psychological question as to what the inner conditions
are which may make one human character differ so extremely from another.
I reply at once that where the character, as something distinguished from
the intellect, is concerned, the causes of human diversity lie chiefly in
our _differing susceptibilities of emotional excitement_, and in the
_different impulses and inhibitions_ which these bring in their train. Let
me make this more clear.
Speaking generally, our moral and practical attitude, at any given time,
is always a resultant of two sets of forces within us, impulses pushing us
one way and obstructions and inhibitions holding us back. “Yes! yes!” say
the impulses; “No! no!” say the inhibitions. Few people who have not
expressly reflected on the matter realize how constantly this factor of
inhibition is upon us, how it contains and moulds us by its restrictive
pressure almost as if we were fluids pent within the cavity of a jar. The
influence is so incessant that it becomes subconscious. All of you, for
example, sit here with a certain constraint at this moment, and entirely
without express consciousness of the fact, because of the influence of the
occasion. If left alone in the room, each of you would probably
involuntarily rearrange himself, and make his attitude more “free and
easy.” But proprieties and their inhibitions snap like cobwebs if any
great emotional excitement supervenes. I have seen a dandy appear in the
street with his face covered with shaving‐lather because a house across
the way was on fire; and a woman will run among strangers in her nightgown
if it be a question of saving her baby’s life or her own. Take a self‐
indulgent woman’s life in general. She will yield to every inhibition set
by her disagreeable sensations, lie late in bed, live upon tea or
bromides, keep indoors from the cold. Every difficulty finds her obedient
to its “no.” But make a mother of her, and what have you? Possessed by
maternal excitement, she now confronts wakefulness, weariness, and toil
without an instant of hesitation or a word of complaint. The inhibitive
power of pain over her is extinguished wherever the baby’s interests are
at stake. The inconveniences which this creature occasions have become, as
James Hinton says, the glowing heart of a great joy, and indeed are now
the very conditions whereby the joy becomes most deep.
This is an example of what you have already heard of as the “expulsive
power of a higher affection.” But be the affection high or low, it makes
no difference, so long as the excitement it brings be strong enough. In
one of Henry Drummond’s discourses he tells of an inundation in India
where an eminence with a bungalow upon it remained unsubmerged, and became
the refuge of a number of wild animals and reptiles in addition to the
human beings who were there. At a certain moment a royal Bengal tiger
appeared swimming towards it, reached it, and lay panting like a dog upon
the ground in the midst of the people, still possessed by such an agony of
terror that one of the Englishmen could calmly step up with a rifle and
blow out its brains. The tiger’s habitual ferocity was temporarily quelled
by the emotion of fear, which became sovereign, and formed a new centre
for his character.
Sometimes no emotional state is sovereign, but many contrary ones are
mixed together. In that case one hears both “yeses” and “noes,” and the
“will” is called on then to solve the conflict. Take a soldier, for
example, with his dread of cowardice impelling him to advance, his fears
impelling him to run, and his propensities to imitation pushing him
towards various courses if his comrades offer various examples. His person
becomes the seat of a mass of interferences; and he may for a time simply
waver, because no one emotion prevails. There is a pitch of intensity,
though, which, if any emotion reach it, enthrones that one as alone
effective and sweeps its antagonists and all their inhibitions away. The
fury of his comrades’ charge, once entered on, will give this pitch of
courage to the soldier; the panic of their rout will give this pitch of
fear. In these sovereign excitements, things ordinarily impossible grow
natural because the inhibitions are annulled. Their “no! no!” not only is
not heard, it does not exist. Obstacles are then like tissue‐paper hoops
to the circus rider—no impediment; the flood is higher than the dam they
make. “Lass sie betteln gehn wenn sie hungrig sind!” cries the grenadier,
frantic over his Emperor’s capture, when his wife and babes are suggested;
and men pent into a burning theatre have been known to cut their way
through the crowd with knives.(143)
One mode of emotional excitability is exceedingly important in the
composition of the energetic character, from its peculiarly destructive
power over inhibitions. I mean what in its lower form is mere
irascibility, susceptibility to wrath, the fighting temper; and what in
subtler ways manifests itself as impatience, grimness, earnestness,
severity of character. Earnestness means willingness to live with energy,
though energy bring pain. The pain may be pain to other people or pain to
one’s self—it makes little difference; for when the strenuous mood is on
one, the aim is to break something, no matter whose or what. Nothing
annihilates an inhibition as irresistibly as anger does it; for, as Moltke
says of war, destruction pure and simple is its essence. This is what
makes it so invaluable an ally of every other passion. The sweetest
delights are trampled on with a ferocious pleasure the moment they offer
themselves as checks to a cause by which our higher indignations are
elicited. It costs then nothing to drop friendships, to renounce long‐
rooted privileges and possessions, to break with social ties. Rather do we
take a stern joy in the astringency and desolation; and what is called
weakness of character seems in most cases to consist in the inaptitude for
these sacrificial moods, of which one’s own inferior self and its pet
softnesses must often be the targets and the victims.(144)
So far I have spoken of temporary alterations produced by shifting
excitements in the same person. But the relatively fixed differences of
character of different persons are explained in a precisely similar way.
In a man with a liability to a special sort of emotion, whole ranges of
inhibition habitually vanish, which in other men remain effective, and
other sorts of inhibition take their place. When a person has an inborn
genius for certain emotions, his life differs strangely from that of
ordinary people, for none of their usual deterrents check him. Your mere
aspirant to a type of character, on the contrary, only shows, when your
natural lover, fighter, or reformer, with whom the passion is a gift of
nature, comes along, the hopeless inferiority of voluntary to instinctive
action. He has deliberately to overcome his inhibitions; the genius with
the inborn passion seems not to feel them at all; he is free of all that
inner friction and nervous waste. To a Fox, a Garibaldi, a General Booth,
a John Brown, a Louise Michel, a Bradlaugh, the obstacles omnipotent over
those around them are as if non‐existent. Could the rest of us so
disregard them, there might be many such heroes, for many have the wish to
live for similar ideals, and only the adequate degree of inhibition‐
quenching fury is lacking.(145)
The difference between willing and merely wishing, between having ideals
that are creative and ideals that are but pinings and regrets, thus
depends solely either on the amount of steam‐pressure chronically driving
the character in the ideal direction, or on the amount of ideal excitement
transiently acquired. Given a certain amount of love, indignation,
generosity, magnanimity, admiration, loyalty, or enthusiasm of self‐
surrender, the result is always the same. That whole raft of cowardly
obstructions, which in tame persons and dull moods are sovereign
impediments to action, sinks away at once. Our conventionality,(146) our
shyness, laziness, and stinginess, our demands for precedent and
permission, for guarantee and surety, our small suspicions, timidities,
despairs, where are they now? Severed like cobwebs, broken like bubbles in
the sun—
“Wo sind die Sorge nun und Noth
Die mich noch gestern wollt’ erschlaffen?
Ich schäm’ mich dess’ im Morgenroth.”
The flood we are borne on rolls them so lightly under that their very
contact is unfelt. Set free of them, we float and soar and sing. This
auroral openness and uplift gives to all creative ideal levels a bright
and caroling quality, which is nowhere more marked than where the
controlling emotion is religious. “The true monk,” writes an Italian
mystic, “takes nothing with him but his lyre.”
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
We may now turn from these psychological generalities to those fruits of
the religious state which form the special subject of our present lecture.
The man who lives in his religious centre of personal energy, and is
actuated by spiritual enthusiasms, differs from his previous carnal self
in perfectly definite ways. The new ardor which burns in his breast
consumes in its glow the lower “noes” which formerly beset him, and keeps
him immune against infection from the entire groveling portion of his
nature. Magnanimities once impossible are now easy; paltry
conventionalities and mean incentives once tyrannical hold no sway. The
stone wall inside of him has fallen, the hardness in his heart has broken
down. The rest of us can, I think, imagine this by recalling our state of
feeling in those temporary “melting moods” into which either the trials of
real life, or the theatre, or a novel sometimes throw us. Especially if we
weep! For it is then as if our tears broke through an inveterate inner
dam, and let all sorts of ancient peccancies and moral stagnancies drain
away, leaving us now washed and soft of heart and open to every nobler
leading. With most of us the customary hardness quickly returns, but not
so with saintly persons. Many saints, even as energetic ones as Teresa and
Loyola, have possessed what the church traditionally reveres as a special
grace, the so‐called gift of tears. In these persons the melting mood
seems to have held almost uninterrupted control. And as it is with tears
and melting moods, so it is with other exalted affections. Their reign may
come by gradual growth or by a crisis; but in either case it may have
“come to stay.”
At the end of the last lecture we saw this permanence to be true of the
general paramountcy of the higher insight, even though in the ebbs of
emotional excitement meaner motives might temporarily prevail and
backsliding might occur. But that lower temptations may remain completely
annulled, apart from transient emotion and as if by alteration of the
man’s habitual nature, is also proved by documentary evidence in certain
cases. Before embarking on the general natural history of the regenerate
character, let me convince you of this curious fact by one or two
examples. The most numerous are those of reformed drunkards. You recollect
the case of Mr. Hadley in the last lecture; the Jerry McAuley Water Street
Mission abounds in similar instances.(147) You also remember the graduate
of Oxford, converted at three in the afternoon, and getting drunk in the
hay‐field the next day, but after that permanently cured of his appetite.
“From that hour drink has had no terrors for me: I never touch it, never
want it. The same thing occurred with my pipe, ... the desire for it went
at once and has never returned. So with every known sin, the deliverance
in each case being permanent and complete. I have had no temptations since
conversion.”
Here is an analogous case from Starbuck’s manuscript collection:—
“I went into the old Adelphi Theatre, where there was a Holiness
meeting, ... and I began saying, ‘Lord, Lord, I must have this
blessing.’ Then what was to me an audible voice said: ‘Are you
willing to give up everything to the Lord?’ and question after
question kept coming up, to all of which I said: ‘Yes, Lord; yes,
Lord!’ until this came: ‘Why do you not accept it _now_?’ and I
said: ‘I do, Lord.’—I felt no particular joy, only a trust. Just
then the meeting closed, and, as I went out on the street, I met a
gentleman smoking a fine cigar, and a cloud of smoke came into my
face, and I took a long, deep breath of it, and praise the Lord,
all my appetite for it was gone. Then as I walked along the
street, passing saloons where the fumes of liquor came out, I
found that all my taste and longing for that accursed stuff was
gone. Glory to God! ... [But] for ten or eleven long years [after
that] I was in the wilderness with its ups and downs. My appetite
for liquor never came back.”
The classic case of Colonel Gardiner is that of a man cured of sexual
temptation in a single hour. To Mr. Spears the colonel said, “I was
effectually cured of all inclination to that sin I was so strongly
addicted to that I thought nothing but shooting me through the head could
have cured me of it; and all desire and inclination to it was removed, as
entirely as if I had been a sucking child; nor did the temptation return
to this day.” Mr. Webster’s words on the same subject are these: “One
thing I have heard the colonel frequently say, that he was much addicted
to impurity before his acquaintance with religion; but that, so soon as he
was enlightened from above, he felt the power of the Holy Ghost changing
his nature so wonderfully that his sanctification in this respect seemed
more remarkable than in any other.”(148)
Such rapid abolition of ancient impulses and propensities reminds us so
strongly of what has been observed as the result of hypnotic suggestion
that it is difficult not to believe that subliminal influences play the
decisive part in these abrupt changes of heart, just as they do in
hypnotism.(149) Suggestive therapeutics abound in records of cure, after a
few sittings, of inveterate bad habits with which the patient, left to
ordinary moral and physical influences, had struggled in vain. Both
drunkenness and sexual vice have been cured in this way, action through
the subliminal seeming thus in many individuals to have the prerogative of
inducing relatively stable change. If the grace of God miraculously
operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door, then. But just
_how_ anything operates in this region is still unexplained, and we shall
do well now to say good‐by to the _process_ of transformation
altogether,—leaving it, if you like, a good deal of a psychological or
theological mystery,—and to turn our attention to the fruits of the
religious condition, no matter in what way they may have been
produced.(150)
The collective name for the ripe fruits of religion in a character is
Saintliness.(151) The saintly character is the character for which
spiritual emotions are the habitual centre of the personal energy; and
there is a certain composite photograph of universal saintliness, the same
in all religions, of which the features can easily be traced.(152)
They are these:—
1. A feeling of being in a wider life than that of this world’s selfish
little interests; and a conviction, not merely intellectual, but as it
were sensible, of the existence of an Ideal Power. In Christian
saintliness this power is always personified as God; but abstract moral
ideals, civic or patriotic utopias, or inner visions of holiness or right
may also be felt as the true lords and enlargers of our life, in ways
which I described in the lecture on the Reality of the Unseen.(153)
2. A sense of the friendly continuity of the ideal power with our own
life, and a willing self‐surrender to its control.
3. An immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of the confining
selfhood melt down.
4. A shifting of the emotional centre towards loving and harmonious
affections, towards “yes, yes” and away from “no,” where the claims of the
non‐ego are concerned.
These fundamental inner conditions have characteristic practical
consequences, as follows:—
_a._ _Asceticism._—The self‐surrender may become so passionate as to turn
into self‐immolation. It may then so overrule the ordinary inhibitions of
the flesh that the saint finds positive pleasure in sacrifice and
asceticism, measuring and expressing as they do the degree of his loyalty
to the higher power.
_b._ _Strength of Soul._—The sense of enlargement of life may be so
uplifting that personal motives and inhibitions, commonly omnipotent,
become too insignificant for notice, and new reaches of patience and
fortitude open out. Fears and anxieties go, and blissful equanimity takes
their place. Come heaven, come hell, it makes no difference now!
“We forbid ourselves all seeking after popularity, all ambition to
appear important. We pledge ourselves to abstain from falsehood,
in all its degrees. We promise not to create or encourage
illusions as to what is possible, by what we say or write. We
promise to one another active sincerity, which strives to see
truth clearly, and which never fears to declare what it sees.
“We promise deliberate resistance to the tidal waves of fashion,
to the ‘booms’ and panics of the public mind, to all the forms of
weakness and of fear.
“We forbid ourselves the use of sarcasm. Of serious things we will
speak seriously and unsmilingly, without banter and without the
appearance of banter;—and even so of all things, for there are
serious ways of being light of heart.
“We will put ourselves forward always for what we are, simply and
without false humility, as well as without pedantry, affectation,
or pride.”
_c._ _Purity._—The shifting of the emotional centre brings with it, first,
increase of purity. The sensitiveness to spiritual discords is enhanced,
and the cleansing of existence from brutal and sensual elements becomes
imperative. Occasions of contact with such elements are avoided: the
saintly life must deepen its spiritual consistency and keep unspotted from
the world. In some temperaments this need of purity of spirit takes an
ascetic turn, and weaknesses of the flesh are treated with relentless
severity.
_d._ _Charity._—The shifting of the emotional centre brings, secondly,
increase of charity, tenderness for fellow‐creatures. The ordinary motives
to antipathy, which usually set such close bounds to tenderness among
human beings, are inhibited. The saint loves his enemies, and treats
loathsome beggars as his brothers.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
I now have to give some concrete illustrations of these fruits of the
spiritual tree. The only difficulty is to choose, for they are so
abundant.
Since the sense of Presence of a higher and friendly Power seems to be the
fundamental feature in the spiritual life, I will begin with that.
In our narratives of conversion we saw how the world might look shining
and transfigured to the convert,(154) and, apart from anything acutely
religious, we all have moments when the universal life seems to wrap us
round with friendliness. In youth and health, in summer, in the woods or
on the mountains, there come days when the weather seems all whispering
with peace, hours when the goodness and beauty of existence enfold us like
a dry warm climate, or chime through us as if our inner ears were subtly
ringing with the world’s security. Thoreau writes:—
“Once, a few weeks after I came to the woods, for an hour I
doubted whether the near neighborhood of man was not essential to
a serene and healthy life. To be alone was somewhat unpleasant.
But, in the midst of a gentle rain, while these thoughts
prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent
society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in
every sight and sound around my house, an infinite and
unaccountable friendliness all at once, like an atmosphere,
sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human
neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them
since. Every little pine‐needle expanded and swelled with sympathy
and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence
of something kindred to me, that I thought no place could ever be
strange to me again.”(155)
In the Christian consciousness this sense of the enveloping friendliness
becomes most personal and definite. “The compensation,” writes a German
author, “for the loss of that sense of personal independence which man so
unwillingly gives up, is the disappearance of all _fear_ from one’s life,
the quite indescribable and inexplicable feeling of an inner _security_,
which one can only experience, but which, once it has been experienced,
one can never forget.”(156)
I find an excellent description of this state of mind in a sermon by Mr.
Voysey:—
“It is the experience of myriads of trustful souls, that this
sense of God’s unfailing presence with them in their going out and
in their coming in, and by night and day, is a source of absolute
repose and confident calmness. It drives away all fear of what may
befall them. That nearness of God is a constant security against
terror and anxiety. It is not that they are at all assured of
physical safety, or deem themselves protected by a love which is
denied to others, but that they are in a state of mind equally
ready to be safe or to meet with injury. If injury befall them,
they will be content to bear it because the Lord is their keeper,
and nothing can befall them without his will. If it be his will,
then injury is for them a blessing and no calamity at all. Thus
and thus only is the trustful man protected and shielded from
harm. And I for one—by no means a thick‐skinned or hard‐nerved
man—am absolutely satisfied with this arrangement, and do not wish
for any other kind of immunity from danger and catastrophe. Quite
as sensitive to pain as the most highly strung organism, I yet
feel that the worst of it is conquered, and the sting taken out of
it altogether, by the thought that God is our loving and sleepless
keeper, and that nothing can hurt us without his will.”(157)
More excited expressions of this condition are abundant in religious
literature. I could easily weary you with their monotony. Here is an
account from Mrs. Jonathan Edwards:—