Chapter X: Part 10

“Even from the purely human point of view,” Sainte‐Beuve says, “the 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.”

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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.

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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:—

“Last night,” Mrs. Edwards writes, “was the sweetest night I ever
had in my life. I never before, for so long a time together,
enjoyed so much of the light and rest and sweetness of heaven in
my soul, but without the least agitation of body during the whole
time. Part of the night I lay awake, sometimes asleep, and
sometimes between sleeping and waking. But all night I continued
in a constant, clear, and lively sense of the heavenly sweetness
of Christ’s excellent love, of his nearness to me, and of my
dearness to him; with an inexpressibly sweet calmness of soul in
an entire rest in him. I seemed to myself to perceive a glow of
divine love come down from the heart of Christ in heaven into my
heart in a constant stream, like a stream or pencil of sweet
light. At the same time my heart and soul all flowed out in love
to Christ, so that there seemed to be a constant flowing and
reflowing of heavenly love, and I appeared to myself to float or
swim, in these bright, sweet beams, like the motes swimming in the
beams of the sun, or the streams of his light which come in at the
window. I think that what I felt each minute was worth more than
all the outward comfort and pleasure which I had enjoyed in my
whole life put together. It was pleasure, without the least sting,
or any interruption. It was a sweetness, which my soul was lost
in; it seemed to be all that my feeble frame could sustain. There
was but little difference, whether I was asleep or awake, but if
there was any difference, the sweetness was greatest while I was
asleep.(158) As I awoke early the next morning, it seemed to me
that I had entirely done with myself. I felt that the opinions of
the world concerning me were nothing, and that I had no more to do
with any outward interest of my own than with that of a person
whom I never saw. The glory of God seemed to swallow up every wish
and desire of my heart.... After retiring to rest and sleeping a
little while, I awoke, and was led to reflect on God’s mercy to
me, in giving me, for many years, a willingness to die; and after
that, in making me willing to live, that I might do and suffer
whatever he called me to here. I also thought how God had
graciously given me an entire resignation to his will, with
respect to the kind and manner of death that I should die; having
been made willing to die on the rack, or at the stake, and if it
were God’s will, to die in darkness. But now it occurred to me, I
used to think of living no longer than to the ordinary age of man.
Upon this I was led to ask myself, whether I was not willing to be
kept out of heaven even longer; and my whole heart seemed
immediately to reply: Yes, a thousand years, and a thousand in
horror, if it be most for the honor of God, the torment of my body
being so great, awful, and overwhelming that none could bear to
live in the country where the spectacle was seen, and the torment
of my mind being vastly greater. And it seemed to me that I found
a perfect willingness, quietness, and alacrity of soul in
consenting that it should be so, if it were most for the glory of
God, so that there was no hesitation, doubt, or darkness in my
mind. The glory of God seemed to overcome me and swallow me up,
and every conceivable suffering, and everything that was terrible
to my nature, seemed to shrink to nothing before it. This
resignation continued in its clearness and brightness the rest of
the night, and all the next day, and the night following, and on
Monday in the forenoon, without interruption or abatement.”(159)

The annals of Catholic saintship abound in records as ecstatic or more ecstatic than this. “Often the assaults of the divine love,” it is said of the Sister Séraphique de la Martinière, “reduced her almost to the point of death. She used tenderly to complain of this to God. ‘I cannot support it,’ she used to say. ‘Bear gently with my weakness, or I shall expire under the violence of your love.’ ”(160)

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Let me pass next to the Charity and Brotherly Love which are a usual fruit of saintliness, and have always been reckoned essential theological virtues, however limited may have been the kinds of service which the particular theology enjoined. Brotherly love would follow logically from the assurance of God’s friendly presence, the notion of our brotherhood as men being an immediate inference from that of God’s fatherhood of us all. When Christ utters the precepts: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you,” he gives for a reason: “That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” One might therefore be tempted to explain both the humility as to one’s self and the charity towards others which characterize spiritual excitement, as results of the all‐leveling character of theistic belief. But these affections are certainly not mere derivatives of theism. We find them in Stoicism, in Hinduism, and in Buddhism in the highest possible degree. They harmonize with paternal theism beautifully; but they _harmonize_ with all reflection whatever upon the dependence of mankind on general causes; and we must, I think, consider them not subordinate but coördinate parts of that great complex excitement in the study of which we are engaged. Religious rapture, moral enthusiasm, ontological wonder, cosmic emotion, are all unifying states of mind, in which the sand and grit of the selfhood incline to disappear, and tenderness to rule. The best thing is to describe the condition integrally as a characteristic affection to which our nature is liable, a region in which we find ourselves at home, a sea in which we swim; but not to pretend to explain its parts by deriving them too cleverly from one another. Like love or fear, the faith‐state is a natural psychic complex, and carries charity with it by organic consequence. Jubilation is an expansive affection, and all expansive affections are self‐forgetful and kindly so long as they endure.

We find this the case even when they are pathological in origin. In his instructive work, la Tristesse et la Joie,(161) M. Georges Dumas compares together the melancholy and the joyous phase of circular insanity, and shows that, while selfishness characterizes the one, the other is marked by altruistic impulses. No human being so stingy and useless as was Marie in her melancholy period! But the moment the happy period begins, “sympathy and kindness become her characteristic sentiments. She displays a universal goodwill, not only of intention, but in act.... She becomes solicitous of the health of other patients, interested in getting them out, desirous to procure wool to knit socks for some of them. Never since she has been under my observation have I heard her in her joyous period utter any but charitable opinions.”(162) And later, Dr. Dumas says of all such joyous conditions that “unselfish sentiments and tender emotions are the only affective states to be found in them. The subject’s mind is closed against envy, hatred, and vindictiveness, and wholly transformed into benevolence, indulgence, and mercy.”(163)

There is thus an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise. Along with the happiness, this increase of tenderness is often noted in narratives of conversion. “I began to work for others”;—“I had more tender feeling for my family and friends”;—“I spoke at once to a person with whom I had been angry”;—“I felt for every one, and loved my friends better”;—“I felt every one to be my friend”;—these are so many expressions from the records collected by Professor Starbuck.(164)

“When,” says Mrs. Edwards, continuing the narrative from which I
made quotation a moment ago, “I arose on the morning of the
Sabbath, I felt a love to all mankind, wholly peculiar in its
strength and sweetness, far beyond all that I had ever felt
before. The power of that love seemed inexpressible. I thought, if
I were surrounded by enemies, who were venting their malice and
cruelty upon me, in tormenting me, it would still be impossible
that I should cherish any feelings towards them but those of love,
and pity, and ardent desires for their happiness. I never before
felt so far from a disposition to judge and censure others, as I
did that morning. I realized also, in an unusual and very lively
manner, how great a part of Christianity lies in the performance
of our social and relative duties to one another. The same joyful
sense continued throughout the day—a sweet love to God and all
mankind.”

Whatever be the explanation of the charity, it may efface all usual human barriers.(165)

Here, for instance, is an example of Christian non‐resistance from Richard Weaver’s autobiography. Weaver was a collier, a semi‐professional pugilist in his younger days, who became a much beloved evangelist. Fighting, after drinking, seems to have been the sin to which he originally felt his flesh most perversely inclined. After his first conversion he had a backsliding, which consisted in pounding a man who had insulted a girl. Feeling that, having once fallen, he might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, he got drunk and went and broke the jaw of another man who had lately challenged him to fight and taunted him with cowardice for refusing as a Christian man;—I mention these incidents to show how genuine a change of heart is implied in the later conduct which he describes as follows:—

“I went down the drift and found the boy crying because a fellow‐
workman was trying to take the wagon from him by force. I said to
him:—

“ ‘Tom, you mustn’t take that wagon.’

“He swore at me, and called me a Methodist devil. I told him that
God did not tell me to let him rob me. He cursed again, and said
he would push the wagon over me.

“ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘let us see whether the devil and thee are
stronger than the Lord and me.’

“And the Lord and I proving stronger than the devil and he, he had
to get out of the way, or the wagon would have gone over him. So I
gave the wagon to the boy. Then said Tom:—

“ ‘I’ve a good mind to smack thee on the face.’

“ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘if that will do thee any good, thou canst do
it.’ So he struck me on the face.

“I turned the other cheek to him, and said, ‘Strike again.’

“He struck again and again, till he had struck me five times. I
turned my cheek for the sixth stroke; but he turned away cursing.
I shouted after him: ‘The Lord forgive thee, for I do, and the
Lord save thee.’

“This was on a Saturday; and when I went home from the coal‐pit my
wife saw my face was swollen, and asked what was the matter with
it. I said: ‘I’ve been fighting, and I’ve given a man a good
thrashing.’

“She burst out weeping, and said, ‘O Richard, what made you
fight?’ Then I told her all about it; and she thanked the Lord I
had not struck back.

“But the Lord had struck, and his blows have more effect than
man’s. Monday came. The devil began to tempt me, saying: ‘The
other men will laugh at thee for allowing Tom to treat thee as he
did on Saturday.’ I cried, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan;’—and went
on my way to the coal‐pit.

“Tom was the first man I saw. I said ‘Good‐morning,’ but got no
reply.

“He went down first. When I got down, I was surprised to see him
sitting on the wagon‐road waiting for me. When I came to him he
burst into tears and said: ‘Richard, will you forgive me for
striking you?’

“ ‘I have forgiven thee,’ said I; ‘ask God to forgive thee. The
Lord bless thee.’ I gave him my hand, and we went each to his
work.”(166)

“Love your enemies!” Mark you, not simply those who happen not to be your friends, but your _enemies_, your positive and active enemies. Either this is a mere Oriental hyperbole, a bit of verbal extravagance, meaning only that we should, as far as we can, abate our animosities, or else it is sincere and literal. Outside of certain cases of intimate individual relation, it seldom has been taken literally. Yet it makes one ask the question: Can there in general be a level of emotion so unifying, so obliterative of differences between man and man, that even enmity may come to be an irrelevant circumstance and fail to inhibit the friendlier interests aroused? If positive well‐wishing could attain so supreme a degree of excitement, those who were swayed by it might well seem superhuman beings. Their life would be morally discrete from the life of other men, and there is no saying, in the absence of positive experience of an authentic kind,—for there are few active examples in our scriptures, and the Buddhistic examples are legendary,(167)—what the effects might be: they might conceivably transform the world.

Psychologically and in principle, the precept “Love your enemies” is not self‐contradictory. It is merely the extreme limit of a kind of magnanimity with which, in the shape of pitying tolerance of our oppressors, we are fairly familiar. Yet if radically followed, it would involve such a breach with our instinctive springs of action as a whole, and with the present world’s arrangements, that a critical point would practically be passed, and we should be born into another kingdom of being. Religious emotion makes us feel that other kingdom to be close at hand, within our reach.

The inhibition of instinctive repugnance is proved not only by the showing of love to enemies, but by the showing of it to any one who is personally loathsome. In the annals of saintliness we find a curious mixture of motives impelling in this direction. Asceticism plays its part; and along with charity pure and simple, we find humility or the desire to disclaim distinction and to grovel on the common level before God. Certainly all three principles were at work when Francis of Assisi and Ignatius Loyola exchanged their garments with those of filthy beggars. All three are at work when religious persons consecrate their lives to the care of leprosy or other peculiarly unpleasant diseases. The nursing of the sick is a function to which the religious seem strongly drawn, even apart from the fact that church traditions set that way. But in the annals of this sort of charity we find fantastic excesses of devotion recorded which are only explicable by the frenzy of self‐immolation simultaneously aroused. Francis of Assisi kisses his lepers; Margaret Mary Alacoque, Francis Xavier, St. John of God, and others are said to have cleansed the sores and ulcers of their patients with their respective tongues; and the lives of such saints as Elizabeth of Hungary and Madame de Chantal are full of a sort of reveling in hospital purulence, disagreeable to read of, and which makes us admire and shudder at the same time.

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So much for the human love aroused by the faith‐state. Let me next speak of the Equanimity, Resignation, Fortitude, and Patience which it brings.

“A paradise of inward tranquillity” seems to be faith’s usual result; and it is easy, even without being religious one’s self, to understand this. A moment back, in treating of the sense of God’s presence, I spoke of the unaccountable feeling of safety which one may then have. And, indeed, how can it possibly fail to steady the nerves, to cool the fever, and appease the fret, if one be sensibly conscious that, no matter what one’s difficulties for the moment may appear to be, one’s life as a whole is in the keeping of a power whom one can absolutely trust? In deeply religious men the abandonment of self to this power is passionate. Whoever not only says, but _feels_, “God’s will be done,” is mailed against every weakness; and the whole historic array of martyrs, missionaries, and religious reformers is there to prove the tranquil‐mindedness, under naturally agitating or distressing circumstances, which self‐surrender brings.

The temper of the tranquil‐mindedness differs, of course, according as the person is of a constitutionally sombre or of a constitutionally cheerful cast of mind. In the sombre it partakes more of resignation and submission; in the cheerful it is a joyous consent. As an example of the former temper, I quote part of a letter from Professor Lagneau, a venerated teacher of philosophy who lately died, a great invalid, at Paris:—

“My life, for the success of which you send good wishes, will be
what it is able to be. I ask nothing from it, I expect nothing
from it. For long years now I exist, think, and act, and am worth
what I am worth, only through the despair which is my sole
strength and my sole foundation. May it preserve for me, even in
these last trials to which I am coming, the courage to do without
the desire of deliverance. I ask nothing more from the Source
whence all strength cometh, and if that is granted, your wishes
will have been accomplished.”(168)

There is something pathetic and fatalistic about this, but the power of such a tone as a protection against outward shocks is manifest. Pascal is another Frenchman of pessimistic natural temperament. He expresses still more amply the temper of self‐surrendering submissiveness:—

“Deliver me, Lord,” he writes in his prayers, “from the sadness at
my proper suffering which self‐love might give, but put into me a
sadness like your own. Let my sufferings appease your choler. Make
them an occasion for my conversion and salvation. I ask you
neither for health nor for sickness, for life nor for death; but
that you may dispose of my health and my sickness, my life and my
death, for your glory, for my salvation, and for the use of the
Church and of your saints, of whom I would by your grace be one.
You alone know what is expedient for me; you are the sovereign
master; do with me according to your will. Give to me, or take
away from me, only conform my will to yours. I know but one thing,
Lord, that it is good to follow you, and bad to offend you. Apart
from that, I know not what is good or bad in anything. I know not
which is most profitable to me, health or sickness, wealth or
poverty, nor anything else in the world. That discernment is
beyond the power of men or angels, and is hidden among the secrets
of your Providence, which I adore, but do not seek to
fathom.”(169)

When we reach more optimistic temperaments, the resignation grows less passive. Examples are sown so broadcast throughout history that I might well pass on without citation. As it is, I snatch at the first that occurs to my mind. Madame Guyon, a frail creature physically, was yet of a happy native disposition. She went through many perils with admirable serenity of soul. After being sent to prison for heresy,—

“Some of my friends,” she writes, “wept bitterly at the hearing of
it, but such was my state of acquiescence and resignation that it
failed to draw any tears from me.... There appeared to be in me
then, as I find it to be in me now, such an entire loss of what
regards myself, that any of my own interests gave me little pain
or pleasure; ever wanting to will or wish for myself only the very
thing which God does.” In another place she writes: “We all of us
came near perishing in a river which we found it necessary to
pass. The carriage sank in the quicksand. Others who were with us
threw themselves out in excessive fright. But I found my thoughts
so much taken up with God that I had no distinct sense of danger.
It is true that the thought of being drowned passed across my
mind, but it cost no other sensation or reflection in me than
this—that I felt quite contented and willing it were so, if it
were my heavenly Father’s choice.” Sailing from Nice to Genoa, a
storm keeps her eleven days at sea. “As the irritated waves dashed
round us,” she writes, “I could not help experiencing a certain
degree of satisfaction in my mind. I pleased myself with thinking
that those mutinous billows, under the command of Him who does all
things rightly, might probably furnish me with a watery grave.
Perhaps I carried the point too far, in the pleasure which I took
in thus seeing myself beaten and bandied by the swelling waters.
Those who were with me took notice of my intrepidity.”(170)

The contempt of danger which religious enthusiasm produces may be even more buoyant still. I take an example from that charming recent autobiography, “With Christ at Sea,” by Frank Bullen. A couple of days after he went through the conversion on shipboard of which he there gives an account,—

“It was blowing stiffly,” he writes, “and we were carrying a press
of canvas to get north out of the bad weather. Shortly after four
bells we hauled down the flying‐jib, and I sprang out astride the
boom to furl it. I was sitting astride the boom when suddenly it
gave way with me. The sail slipped through my fingers, and I fell
backwards, hanging head downwards over the seething tumult of
shining foam under the ship’s bows, suspended by one foot. But I
felt only high exultation in my certainty of eternal life.
Although death was divided from me by a hair’s breadth, and I was
acutely conscious of the fact, it gave me no sensation but joy. I
suppose I could have hung there no longer than five seconds, but
in that time I lived a whole age of delight. But my body asserted
itself, and with a desperate gymnastic effort I regained the boom.
How I furled the sail I don’t know, but I sang at the utmost pitch
of my voice praises to God that went pealing out over the dark
waste of waters.”(171)

The annals of martyrdom are of course the signal field of triumph for religious imperturbability. Let me cite as an example the statement of a humble sufferer, persecuted as a Huguenot under Louis XIV.:—

“They shut all the doors,” Blanche Gamond writes, “and I saw six
women, each with a bunch of willow rods as thick as the hand could
hold, and a yard long. He gave me the order, ‘Undress yourself,’
which I did. He said, ‘You are leaving on your shift; you must
take it off.’ They had so little patience that they took it off
themselves, and I was naked from the waist up. They brought a cord
with which they tied me to a beam in the kitchen. They drew the
cord tight with all their strength and asked me, ‘Does it hurt
you?’ and then they discharged their fury upon me, exclaiming as
they struck me, ‘Pray now to your God.’ It was the Roulette woman
who held this language. But at this moment I received the greatest
consolation that I can ever receive in my life, since I had the
honor of being whipped for the name of Christ, and in addition of
being crowned with his mercy and his consolations. Why can I not
write down the inconceivable influences, consolations, and peace
which I felt interiorly? To understand them one must have passed
by the same trial; they were so great that I was ravished, for
there where afflictions abound grace is given superabundantly. In
vain the women cried, ‘We must double our blows; she does not feel
them, for she neither speaks nor cries.’ And how should I have
cried, since I was swooning with happiness within?”(172)

The transition from tenseness, self‐responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of the personal centre of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down. This abandonment of self‐responsibility seems to be the fundamental act in specifically religious, as distinguished from moral practice. It antedates theologies and is independent of philosophies. Mind‐cure, theosophy, stoicism, ordinary neurological hygiene, insist on it as emphatically as Christianity does, and it is capable of entering into closest marriage with every speculative creed.(173) Christians who have it strongly live in what is called “recollection,” and are never anxious about the future, nor worry over the outcome of the day. Of Saint Catharine of Genoa it is said that “she took cognizance of things, only as they were presented to her in succession, _moment by moment_.” To her holy soul, “the divine moment was the present moment,... and when the present moment was estimated in itself and in its relations, and when the duty that was involved in it was accomplished, it was permitted to pass away as if it had never been, and to give way to the facts and duties of the moment which came after.”(174)

Hinduism, mind‐cure, and theosophy all lay great emphasis upon this concentration of the consciousness upon the moment at hand.

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The next religious symptom which I will note is what I have called Purity of Life. The saintly person becomes exceedingly sensitive to inner inconsistency or discord, and mixture and confusion grow intolerable. All the mind’s objects and occupations must be ordered with reference to the special spiritual excitement which is now its keynote. Whatever is unspiritual taints the pure water of the soul and is repugnant. Mixed with this exaltation of the moral sensibilities there is also an ardor of sacrifice, for the beloved deity’s sake, of everything unworthy of him. Sometimes the spiritual ardor is so sovereign that purity is achieved at a stroke—we have seen examples. Usually it is a more gradual conquest. Billy Bray’s account of his abandonment of tobacco is a good example of the latter form of achievement.

“I had been a smoker as well as a drunkard, and I used to love my
tobacco as much as I loved my meat, and I would rather go down
into the mine without my dinner than without my pipe. In the days
of old, the Lord spoke by the mouths of his servants, the
prophets; now he speaks to us by the spirit of his Son. I had not
only the feeling part of religion, but I could hear the small,
still voice within speaking to me. When I took the pipe to smoke,
it would be applied within, ‘It is an idol, a lust; worship the
Lord with clean lips.’ So, I felt it was not right to smoke. The
Lord also sent a woman to convince me. I was one day in a house,
and I took out my pipe to light it at the fire, and Mary Hawke—for
that was the woman’s name—said, ‘Do you not feel it is wrong to
smoke?’ I said that I felt something inside telling me that it was
an idol, a lust, and she said that was the Lord. Then I said,
‘Now, I must give it up, for the Lord is telling me of it inside,
and the woman outside, so the tobacco must go, love it as I may.’
There and then I took the tobacco out of my pocket, and threw it
into the fire, and put the pipe under my foot, ‘ashes to ashes,
dust to dust.’ And I have not smoked since. I found it hard to
break off old habits, but I cried to the Lord for help, and he
gave me strength, for he has said, ‘Call upon me in the day of
trouble, and I will deliver thee.’ The day after I gave up smoking
I had the toothache so bad that I did not know what to do. I
thought this was owing to giving up the pipe, but I said I would
never smoke again, if I lost every tooth in my head. I said,
‘Lord, thou hast told us My yoke is easy and my burden is light,’
and when I said that, all the pain left me. Sometimes the thought
of the pipe would come back to me very strong; but the Lord
strengthened me against the habit, and, bless his name, I have not
smoked since.”