appear to converts after their awakening.(320) As a rule, religious
persons generally assume that whatever natural facts connect themselves in
any way with their destiny are significant of the divine purposes with
them. Through prayer the purpose, often far from obvious, comes home to
them, and if it be “trial,” strength to endure the trial is given. Thus at
all stages of the prayerful life we find the persuasion that in the
process of communion energy from on high flows in to meet demand, and
becomes operative within the phenomenal world. So long as this
operativeness is admitted to be real, it makes no essential difference
whether its immediate effects be subjective or objective. The fundamental
religious point is that in prayer, spiritual energy, which otherwise would
slumber, does become active, and spiritual work of some kind is effected
really.
So much for Prayer, taken in the wide sense of any kind of communion. As
the core of religion, we must return to it in the next lecture.
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The last aspect of the religious life which remains for me to touch upon
is the fact that its manifestations so frequently connect themselves with
the subconscious part of our existence. You may remember what I said in my
opening lecture(321) about the prevalence of the psychopathic temperament
in religious biography. You will in point of fact hardly find a religious
leader of any kind in whose life there is no record of automatisms. I
speak not merely of savage priests and prophets, whose followers regard
automatic utterance and action as by itself tantamount to inspiration, I
speak of leaders of thought and subjects of intellectualized experience.
Saint Paul had his visions, his ecstasies, his gift of tongues, small as
was the importance he attached to the latter. The whole array of Christian
saints and heresiarchs, including the greatest, the Bernards, the Loyolas,
the Luthers, the Foxes, the Wesleys, had their visions, voices, rapt
conditions, guiding impressions, and “openings.” They had these things,
because they had exalted sensibility, and to such things persons of
exalted sensibility are liable. In such liability there lie, however,
consequences for theology. Beliefs are strengthened wherever automatisms
corroborate them. Incursions from beyond the transmarginal region have a
peculiar power to increase conviction. The inchoate sense of presence is
infinitely stronger than conception, but strong as it may be, it is seldom
equal to the evidence of hallucination. Saints who actually see or hear
their Saviour reach the acme of assurance. Motor automatisms, though
rarer, are, if possible, even more convincing than sensations. The
subjects here actually feel themselves played upon by powers beyond their
will. The evidence is dynamic; the God or spirit moves the very organs of
their body.(322)
The great field for this sense of being the instrument of a higher power
is of course “inspiration.” It is easy to discriminate between the
religious leaders who have been habitually subject to inspiration and
those who have not. In the teachings of the Buddha, of Jesus, of Saint
Paul (apart from his gift of tongues), of Saint Augustine, of Huss, of
Luther, of Wesley, automatic or semi‐automatic composition appears to have
been only occasional. In the Hebrew prophets, on the contrary, in
Mohammed, in some of the Alexandrians, in many minor Catholic saints, in
Fox, in Joseph Smith, something like it appears to have been frequent,
sometimes habitual. We have distinct professions of being under the
direction of a foreign power, and serving as its mouthpiece. As regards
the Hebrew prophets, it is extraordinary, writes an author who has made a
careful study of them, to see—
“How, one after another, the same features are reproduced in the
prophetic books. The process is always extremely different from
what it would be if the prophet arrived at his insight into
spiritual things by the tentative efforts of his own genius. There
is something sharp and sudden about it. He can lay his finger, so
to speak, on the moment when it came. And it always comes in the
form of an overpowering force from without, against which he
struggles, but in vain. Listen, for instance, [to] the opening of
the book of Jeremiah. Read through in like manner the first two
chapters of the prophecy of Ezekiel.
“It is not, however, only at the beginning of his career that the
prophet passes through a crisis which is clearly not self‐caused.
Scattered all through the prophetic writings are expressions which
speak of some strong and irresistible impulse coming down upon the
prophet, determining his attitude to the events of his time,
constraining his utterance, making his words the vehicle of a
higher meaning than their own. For instance, this of Isaiah’s:
‘The Lord spake thus to me with a strong hand,’—an emphatic phrase
which denotes the overmastering nature of the impulse,—‘and
instructed me that I should not walk in the way of this people.’
... Or passages like this from Ezekiel: ‘The hand of the Lord God
fell upon me,’ ‘The hand of the Lord was strong upon me.’ The one
standing characteristic of the prophet is that he speaks with the
authority of Jehovah himself. Hence it is that the prophets one
and all preface their addresses so confidently, ‘The Word of the
Lord,’ or ‘Thus saith the Lord.’ They have even the audacity to
speak in the first person, as if Jehovah himself were speaking. As
in Isaiah: ‘Hearken unto me, O Jacob, and Israel my called; I am
He, I am the First, I also am the last,’—and so on. The
personality of the prophet sinks entirely into the background; he
feels himself for the time being the mouthpiece of the
Almighty.”(323)
“We need to remember that prophecy was a profession, and that the
prophets formed a professional class. There were schools of the
prophets, in which the gift was regularly cultivated. A group of
young men would gather round some commanding figure—a Samuel or an
Elisha—and would not only record or spread the knowledge of his
sayings and doings, but seek to catch themselves something of his
inspiration. It seems that music played its part in their
exercises.... It is perfectly clear that by no means all of these
Sons of the prophets ever succeeded in acquiring more than a very
small share in the gift which they sought. It was clearly possible
to ‘counterfeit’ prophecy. Sometimes this was done
deliberately.... But it by no means follows that in all cases
where a false message was given, the giver of it was altogether
conscious of what he was doing.”(324)
Here, to take another Jewish case, is the way in which Philo of Alexandria
describes his inspiration:—
“Sometimes, when I have come to my work empty, I have suddenly
become full; ideas being in an invisible manner showered upon me,
and implanted in me from on high; so that through the influence of
divine inspiration, I have become greatly excited, and have known
neither the place in which I was, nor those who were present, nor
myself, nor what I was saying, nor what I was writing; for then I
have been conscious of a richness of interpretation, an enjoyment
of light, a most penetrating insight, a most manifest energy in
all that was to be done; having such effect on my mind as the
clearest ocular demonstration would have on the eyes.”(325)
If we turn to Islam, we find that Mohammed’s revelations all came from the
subconscious sphere. To the question in what way he got them,—
“Mohammed is said to have answered that sometimes he heard a knell
as from a bell, and that this had the strongest effect on him; and
when the angel went away, he had received the revelation.
Sometimes again he held converse with the angel as with a man, so
as easily to understand his words. The later authorities, however,
... distinguish still other kinds. In the Itgân (103) the
following are enumerated: 1, revelations with sound of bell, 2, by
inspiration of the holy spirit in M.’s heart, 3, by Gabriel in
human form, 4, by God immediately, either when awake (as in his
journey to heaven) or in dream.... In Almawâhib alladunîya the
kinds are thus given: 1, Dream, 2, Inspiration of Gabriel in the
Prophet’s heart, 3, Gabriel taking Dahya’s form, 4, with the bell‐
sound, etc., 5, Gabriel in propriâ personâ (only twice), 6,
revelation in heaven, 7, God appearing in person, but veiled, 8,
God revealing himself immediately without veil. Others add two
other stages, namely: 1, Gabriel in the form of still another man,
2, God showing himself personally in dream.”(326)
In none of these cases is the revelation distinctly motor. In the case of
Joseph Smith (who had prophetic revelations innumerable in addition to the
revealed translation of the gold plates which resulted in the Book of
Mormon), although there may have been a motor element, the inspiration
seems to have been predominantly sensorial. He began his translation by
the aid of the “peep‐stones” which he found, or thought or said that he
found, with the gold plates,—apparently a case of “crystal gazing.” For
some of the other revelations he used the peep‐stones, but seems generally
to have asked the Lord for more direct instruction.(327)
Other revelations are described as “openings”—Fox’s, for example, were
evidently of the kind known in spiritistic circles of to‐day as
“impressions.” As all effective initiators of change must needs live to
some degree upon this psychopathic level of sudden perception or
conviction of new truth, or of impulse to action so obsessive that it must
be worked off, I will say nothing more about so very common a phenomenon.
When, in addition to these phenomena of inspiration, we take religious
mysticism into the account, when we recall the striking and sudden
unifications of a discordant self which we saw in conversion, and when we
review the extravagant obsessions of tenderness, purity, and self‐severity
met with in saintliness, we cannot, I think, avoid the conclusion that in
religion we have a department of human nature with unusually close
relations to the trans‐marginal or subliminal region. If the word
“subliminal” is offensive to any of you, as smelling too much of psychical
research or other aberrations, call it by any other name you please, to
distinguish it from the level of full sunlit consciousness. Call this
latter the A‐region of personality, if you care to, and call the other the
B‐region. The B‐region, then, is obviously the larger part of each of us,
for it is the abode of everything that is latent and the reservoir of
everything that passes unrecorded or unobserved. It contains, for example,
such things as all our momentarily inactive memories, and it harbors the
springs of all our obscurely motived passions, impulses, likes, dislikes,
and prejudices. Our intuitions, hypotheses, fancies, superstitions,
persuasions, convictions, and in general all our non‐rational operations,
come from it. It is the source of our dreams, and apparently they may
return to it. In it arise whatever mystical experiences we may have, and
our automatisms, sensory or motor; our life in hypnotic and “hypnoid”
conditions, if we are subjects to such conditions; our delusions, fixed
ideas, and hysterical accidents, if we are hysteric subjects; our supra‐
normal cognitions, if such there be, and if we are telepathic subjects. It
is also the fountain‐head of much that feeds our religion. In persons deep
in the religious life, as we have now abundantly seen,—and this is my
conclusion,—the door into this region seems unusually wide open; at any
rate, experiences making their entrance through that door have had
emphatic influence in shaping religious history.
With this conclusion I turn back and close the circle which I opened in my
first lecture, terminating thus the review which I then announced of inner
religious phenomena as we find them in developed and articulate human
individuals. I might easily, if the time allowed, multiply both my
documents and my discriminations, but a broad treatment is, I believe, in
itself better, and the most important characteristics of the subject lie,
I think, before us already. In the next lecture, which is also the last
one, we must try to draw the critical conclusions which so much material
may suggest.
LECTURE XX. CONCLUSIONS.
The material of our study of human nature is now spread before us; and in
this parting hour, set free from the duty of description, we can draw our
theoretical and practical conclusions. In my first lecture, defending the
empirical method, I foretold that whatever conclusions we might come to
could be reached by spiritual judgments only, appreciations of the
significance for life of religion, taken “on the whole.” Our conclusions
cannot be as sharp as dogmatic conclusions would be, but I will formulate
them, when the time comes, as sharply as I can.
Summing up in the broadest possible way the characteristics of the
religious life, as we have found them, it includes the following beliefs:—
1. That the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which
it draws its chief significance;
2. That union or harmonious relation with that higher universe is our true
end;
3. That prayer or inner communion with the spirit thereof—be that spirit
“God” or “law”—is a process wherein work is really done, and spiritual
energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within
the phenomenal world.
Religion includes also the following psychological characteristics:—
4. A new zest which adds itself like a gift to life, and takes the form
either of lyrical enchantment or of appeal to earnestness and heroism.
5. An assurance of safety and a temper of peace, and, in relation to
others, a preponderance of loving affections.
In illustrating these characteristics by documents, we have been literally
bathed in sentiment. In re‐reading my manuscript, I am almost appalled at
the amount of emotionality which I find in it. After so much of this, we
can afford to be dryer and less sympathetic in the rest of the work that
lies before us.
The sentimentality of many of my documents is a consequence of the fact
that I sought them among the extravagances of the subject. If any of you
are enemies of what our ancestors used to brand as enthusiasm, and are,
nevertheless, still listening to me now, you have probably felt my
selection to have been sometimes almost perverse, and have wished I might
have stuck to soberer examples. I reply that I took these extremer
examples as yielding the profounder information. To learn the secrets of
any science, we go to expert specialists, even though they may be
eccentric persons, and not to commonplace pupils. We combine what they
tell us with the rest of our wisdom, and form our final judgment
independently. Even so with religion. We who have pursued such radical
expressions of it may now be sure that we know its secrets as
authentically as any one can know them who learns them from another; and
we have next to answer, each of us for himself, the practical question:
what are the dangers in this element of life? and in what proportion may
it need to be restrained by other elements, to give the proper balance?
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But this question suggests another one which I will answer immediately and
get it out of the way, for it has more than once already vexed us.(328)
Ought it to be assumed that in all men the mixture of religion with other
elements should be identical? Ought it, indeed, to be assumed that the
lives of all men should show identical religious elements? In other words,
is the existence of so many religious types and sects and creeds
regrettable?
To these questions I answer “No” emphatically. And my reason is that I do
not see how it is possible that creatures in such different positions and
with such different powers as human individuals are, should have exactly
the same functions and the same duties. No two of us have identical
difficulties, nor should we be expected to work out identical solutions.
Each, from his peculiar angle of observation, takes in a certain sphere of
fact and trouble, which each must deal with in a unique manner. One of us
must soften himself, another must harden himself; one must yield a point,
another must stand firm,—in order the better to defend the position
assigned him. If an Emerson were forced to be a Wesley, or a Moody forced
to be a Whitman, the total human consciousness of the divine would suffer.
The divine can mean no single quality, it must mean a group of qualities,
by being champions of which in alternation, different men may all find
worthy missions. Each attitude being a syllable in human nature’s total
message, it takes the whole of us to spell the meaning out completely. So
a “god of battles” must be allowed to be the god for one kind of person, a
god of peace and heaven and home, the god for another. We must frankly
recognize the fact that we live in partial systems, and that parts are not
interchangeable in the spiritual life. If we are peevish and jealous,
destruction of the self must be an element of our religion; why need it be
one if we are good and sympathetic from the outset? If we are sick souls,
we require a religion of deliverance; but why think so much of
deliverance, if we are healthy‐minded?(329) Unquestionably, some men have
the completer experience and the higher vocation, here just as in the
social world; but for each man to stay in his own experience, whate’er it
be, and for others to tolerate him there, is surely best.
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But, you may now ask, would not this one‐sidedness be cured if we should
all espouse the science of religions as our own religion? In answering
this question I must open again the general relations of the theoretic to
the active life.
Knowledge about a thing is not the thing itself. You remember what Al‐
Ghazzali told us in the Lecture on Mysticism,—that to understand the
causes of drunkenness, as a physician understands them, is not to be
drunk. A science might come to understand everything about the causes and
elements of religion, and might even decide which elements were qualified,
by their general harmony with other branches of knowledge, to be
considered true; and yet the best man at this science might be the man who
found it hardest to be personally devout. _Tout savoir c’est tout
pardonner._ The name of Renan would doubtless occur to many persons as an
example of the way in which breadth of knowledge may make one only a
dilettante in possibilities, and blunt the acuteness of one’s living
faith.(330) If religion be a function by which either God’s cause or man’s
cause is to be really advanced, then he who lives the life of it, however
narrowly, is a better servant than he who merely knows about it, however
much. Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place
in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.
For this reason, the science of religions may not be an equivalent for
living religion; and if we turn to the inner difficulties of such a
science, we see that a point comes when she must drop the purely theoretic
attitude, and either let her knots remain uncut, or have them cut by
active faith. To see this, suppose that we have our science of religions
constituted as a matter of fact. Suppose that she has assimilated all the
necessary historical material and distilled out of it as its essence the
same conclusions which I myself a few moments ago pronounced. Suppose that
she agrees that religion, wherever it is an active thing, involves a
belief in ideal presences, and a belief that in our prayerful communion
with them,(331) work is done, and something real comes to pass. She has
now to exert her critical activity, and to decide how far, in the light of
other sciences and in that of general philosophy, such beliefs can be
considered _true_.
Dogmatically to decide this is an impossible task. Not only are the other
sciences and the philosophy still far from being completed, but in their
present state we find them full of conflicts. The sciences of nature know
nothing of spiritual presences, and on the whole hold no practical
commerce whatever with the idealistic conceptions towards which general
philosophy inclines. The scientist, so‐called, is, during his scientific
hours at least, so materialistic that one may well say that on the whole
the influence of science goes against the notion that religion should be
recognized at all. And this antipathy to religion finds an echo within the
very science of religions itself. The cultivator of this science has to
become acquainted with so many groveling and horrible superstitions that a
presumption easily arises in his mind that any belief that is religious
probably is false. In the “prayerful communion” of savages with such
mumbo‐jumbos of deities as they acknowledge, it is hard for us to see what
genuine spiritual work—even though it were work relative only to their
dark savage obligations—can possibly be done.
The consequence is that the conclusions of the science of religions are as
likely to be adverse as they are to be favorable to the claim that the
essence of religion is true. There is a notion in the air about us that
religion is probably only an anachronism, a case of “survival,” an
atavistic relapse into a mode of thought which humanity in its more
enlightened examples has outgrown; and this notion our religious
anthropologists at present do little to counteract.
This view is so widespread at the present day that I must consider it with
some explicitness before I pass to my own conclusions. Let me call it the
“Survival theory,” for brevity’s sake.
The pivot round which the religious life, as we have traced it, revolves,
is the interest of the individual in his private personal destiny.
Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human
egotism. The gods believed in—whether by crude savages or by men
disciplined intellectually—agree with each other in recognizing personal
calls. Religious thought is carried on in terms of personality, this
being, in the world of religion, the one fundamental fact. To‐day, quite
as much as at any previous age, the religious individual tells you that
the divine meets him on the basis of his personal concerns.
Science, on the other hand, has ended by utterly repudiating the personal
point of view. She catalogues her elements and records her laws
indifferent as to what purpose may be shown forth by them, and constructs
her theories quite careless of their bearing on human anxieties and fates.
Though the scientist may individually nourish a religion, and be a theist
in his irresponsible hours, the days are over when it could be said that
for Science herself the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament
showeth his handiwork. Our solar system, with its harmonies, is seen now
as but one passing case of a certain sort of moving equilibrium in the
heavens, realized by a local accident in an appalling wilderness of worlds
where no life can exist. In a span of time which as a cosmic interval will
count but as an hour, it will have ceased to be. The Darwinian notion of
chance production, and subsequent destruction, speedy or deferred, applies
to the largest as well as to the smallest facts. It is impossible, in the
present temper of the scientific imagination, to find in the driftings of
the cosmic atoms, whether they work on the universal or on the particular
scale, anything but a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing,
achieving no proper history, and leaving no result. Nature has no one
distinguishable ultimate tendency with which it is possible to feel a
sympathy. In the vast rhythm of her processes, as the scientific mind now
follows them, she appears to cancel herself. The books of natural theology
which satisfied the intellects of our grandfathers seem to us quite
grotesque,(332) representing, as they did, a God who conformed the largest
things of nature to the paltriest of our private wants. The God whom
science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who
does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his
processes to the convenience of individuals. The bubbles on the foam which
coats a stormy sea are floating episodes, made and unmade by the forces of
the wind and water. Our private selves are like those
bubbles,—epiphenomena, as Clifford, I believe, ingeniously called them;
their destinies weigh nothing and determine nothing in the world’s
irremediable currents of events.