Chapter 41

“In this depression and dreadful uninterrupted suffering, I don’t condemn life. On the contrary, I like it and find it good. Can you believe it? I find everything good and pleasant, even my tears, my grief. I enjoy weeping, I enjoy my despair. I enjoy being exasperated and sad. I feel as if these were so many diversions, and I love life in spite of them all. I want to live on. It would be cruel to have me die when I am so accommodating. I cry, I grieve, and at the same time I am pleased—no, not exactly that—I know not how to express it. But everything in life pleases me. I find everything agreeable, and in the very midst of my prayers for happiness, I find myself happy at being miserable. It is not I who undergo all this—my body weeps and cries; but something inside of me which is above me is glad of it all.” Journal de Marie Bashkirtseff, i. 67.

38 R. M. BUCKE: Cosmic Consciousness, pp. 182‐186, abridged.

39 I refer to The Conservator, edited by Horace Traubel, and published monthly at Philadelphia.

40 Song of Myself, 32.

41 Iliad, XXI., E. Myers’s translation.

42 “God is afraid of me!” remarked such a titanic‐optimistic friend in my presence one morning when he was feeling particularly hearty and cannibalistic. The defiance of the phrase showed that a Christian education in humility still rankled in his breast.

43 “As I go on in this life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen. The prim, obliterated, polite surface of life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic—or mænadic—foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me.” R. L. STEVENSON: Letters, ii. 355.

44 “Cautionary Verses for Children”: this title of a much used work, published early in the nineteenth century, shows how far the muse of evangelical protestantism in England, with her mind fixed on the idea of danger, had at last drifted away from the original gospel freedom. Mind‐cure might be briefly called a reaction against all that religion of chronic anxiety which marked the earlier part of our century in the evangelical circles of England and America.

45 I refer to Mr. Horatio W. Dresser and Mr. Henry Wood, especially the former. Mr. Dresser’s works are published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York and London; Mr. Wood’s by Lee & Shepard, Boston.

46 Lest my own testimony be suspected, I will quote another reporter, Dr. H. H. Goddard, of Clark University, whose thesis on “the Effects of Mind on Body as evidenced by Faith Cures” is published in the American Journal of Psychology for 1899 (vol. x.). This critic, after a wide study of the facts, concludes that the cures by mind‐ cure exist, but are in no respect different from those now officially recognized in medicine as cures by suggestion; and the end of his essay contains an interesting physiological speculation as to the way in which the suggestive ideas may work (p. 67 of the reprint). As regards the general phenomenon of mental cure itself, Dr. Goddard writes: “In spite of the severe criticism we have made of reports of cure, there still remains a vast amount of material, showing a powerful influence of the mind in disease. Many cases are of diseases that have been diagnosed and treated by the best physicians of the country, or which prominent hospitals have tried their hand at curing, but without success. People of culture and education have been treated by this method with satisfactory results. Diseases of long standing have been ameliorated, and even cured.... We have traced the mental element through primitive medicine and folk‐medicine of to‐day, patent medicine, and witchcraft. We are convinced that it is impossible to account for the existence of these practices, if they did not cure disease, and that if they cured disease, it must have been the mental element that was effective. The same argument applies to those modern schools of mental therapeutics—Divine Healing and Christian Science. It is hardly conceivable that the large body of intelligent people who comprise the body known distinctively as Mental Scientists should continue to exist if the whole thing were a delusion. It is not a thing of a day; it is not confined to a few; it is not local. It is true that many failures are recorded, but that only adds to the argument. There must be many and striking successes to counterbalance the failures, otherwise the failures would have ended the delusion.... Christian Science, Divine Healing, or Mental Science do not, and never can in the very nature of things, cure all diseases; nevertheless, the practical applications of the general principles of the broadest mental science will tend to prevent disease.... We do find sufficient evidence to convince us that the proper reform in mental attitude would relieve many a sufferer of ills that the ordinary physician cannot touch; would even delay the approach of death to many a victim beyond the power of absolute cure, and the faithful adherence to a truer philosophy of life will keep many a man well, and give the doctor time to devote to alleviating ills that are unpreventable” (pp. 33, 34 of reprint).

47 HORACE FLETCHER: Happiness as found in Forethought _minus_ Fearthought, Menticulture Series, ii. Chicago and New York, Stone, 1897, pp. 21‐25, abridged.

48 H. W. DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, New York, 1899, p. 38.

49 HENRY WOOD: Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography, Boston, 1899, p. 54.

50 Whether it differs so much from Christ’s own notion is for the exegetists to decide. According to Harnack, Jesus felt about evil and disease much as our mind‐curers do. “What is the answer which Jesus sends to John the Baptist?” asks Harnack, and says it is this: “ ‘The blind see, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead rise up, and the gospel is preached to the poor.’ That is the ‘coming of the kingdom,’ or rather in these saving works the kingdom is already there. By the overcoming and removal of misery, of need, of sickness, by these actual effects John is to see that the new time has arrived. The casting out of devils is only a part of this work of redemption, _but Jesus points to that as the sense and seal of his mission_. Thus to the wretched, sick, and poor did he address himself, but not as a moralist, and without a trace of sentimentalism. He never makes groups and departments of the ills; he never spends time in asking whether the sick one ‘deserves’ to be cured; and it never occurs to him to sympathize with the pain or the death. He nowhere says that sickness is a beneficent infliction, and that evil has a healthy use. No, he calls sickness sickness and health health. All evil, all wretchedness, is for him something dreadful; it is of the great kingdom of Satan; but he feels the power of the Saviour within him. He knows that advance is possible only when weakness is overcome, when sickness is made well.” Das Wesen des Christenthums, 1900, p. 39.

51 R. W. TRINE: In Tune with the Infinite, 26th thousand, N. Y., 1899. I have strung scattered passages together.

52 The Cairds, for example. In EDWARD CAIRD’S Glasgow Lectures of 1890‐92 passages like this abound:—

“The declaration made in the beginning of the ministry of Jesus that ‘the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of heaven is at hand,’ passes with scarce a break into the announcement that ‘the kingdom of God is among you’; and the importance of this announcement is asserted to be such that it makes, so to speak, a difference _in kind_ between the greatest saints and prophets who lived under the previous reign of division, and ‘the least in the kingdom of heaven.’ The highest ideal is brought close to men and declared to be within their reach, they are called on to be ‘perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect.’ The sense of alienation and distance from God which had grown upon the pious in Israel just in proportion as they had learned to look upon Him as no mere national divinity, but as a God of justice who would punish Israel for its sin as certainly as Edom or Moab, is declared to be no longer in place; and the typical form of Christian prayer points to the abolition of the contrast between this world and the next which through all the history of the Jews had continually been growing wider: ‘As in heaven, so on earth.’ The sense of the division of man from God, as a finite being from the Infinite, as weak and sinful from the Omnipotent Goodness, is not indeed lost; but it can no longer overpower the consciousness of oneness. The terms ‘Son’ and ‘Father’ at once state the opposition and mark its limit. They show that it is not an absolute opposition, but one which presupposes an indestructible principle of unity, that can and must become a principle of reconciliation.” The Evolution of Religion, ii. pp. 146, 147.

53 It remains to be seen whether the school of Mr. Dresser, which assumes more and more the form of mind‐cure experience and academic philosophy mutually impregnating each other, will score the practical triumphs of the less critical and rational sects.

54 The theistic explanation is by divine grace, which creates a new nature within one the moment the old nature is sincerely given up. The pantheistic explanation (which is that of most mind‐curers) is by the merging of the narrower private self into the wider or greater self, the spirit of the universe (which is your own “subconscious” self), the moment the isolating barriers of mistrust and anxiety are removed. The medico‐materialistic explanation is that simpler cerebral processes act more freely where they are left to act automatically by the shunting‐out of physiologically (though in this instance not spiritually) “higher” ones which, seeking to regulate, only succeed in inhibiting results.—Whether this third explanation might, in a psycho‐physical account of the universe, be combined with either of the others may be left an open question here.

55 Within the churches a disposition has always prevailed to regard sickness as a visitation; something sent by God for our good, either as chastisement, as warning, or as opportunity for exercising virtue, and, in the Catholic Church, of earning “merit.” “Illness,” says a good Catholic writer (P. LEJEUNE: Introd. à la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 218), “is the most excellent of corporeal mortifications, the mortification which one has not one’s self chosen, which is imposed directly by God, and is the direct expression of his will. ‘If other mortifications are of silver,’ Mgr. Gay says, ‘this one is of gold; since although it comes of ourselves, coming as it does of original sin, still on its greater side, as coming (like all that happens) from the providence of God, it is of divine manufacture. And how just are its blows! And how efficacious it is!... I do not hesitate to say that patience in a long illness is mortification’s very masterpiece, and consequently the triumph of mortified souls.’ ” According to this view, disease should in any case be submissively accepted, and it might under certain circumstances even be blasphemous to wish it away.

Of course there have been exceptions to this, and cures by special miracle have at all times been recognized within the church’s pale, almost all the great saints having more or less performed them. It was one of the heresies of Edward Irving, to maintain them still to be possible. An extremely pure faculty of healing after confession and conversion on the patient’s part, and prayer on the priest’s, was quite spontaneously developed in the German pastor, Joh. Christoph Blumhardt, in the early forties and exerted during nearly thirty years. Blumhardt’s Life by Zündel (5th edition, Zurich, 1887) gives in chapters ix., x., xi., and xvii. a pretty full account of his healing activity, which he invariably ascribed to direct divine interposition. Blumhardt was a singularly pure, simple, and non‐ fanatical character, and in this part of his work followed no previous model. In Chicago to‐day we have the case of Dr. J. A. Dowie, a Scottish Baptist preacher, whose weekly “Leaves of Healing” were in the year of grace 1900 in their sixth volume, and who, although he denounces the cures wrought in other sects as “diabolical counterfeits” of his own exclusively “Divine Healing,” must on the whole be counted into the mind‐cure movement. In mind‐ cure circles the fundamental article of faith is that disease should never be accepted. It is wholly of the pit. God wants us to be absolutely healthy, and we should not tolerate ourselves on any lower terms.

56 Edwards, from whose book on the Revival in New England I quote these words, dissuades from such a use of prayer, but it is easy to see that he enjoys making his thrust at the cold dead church members.

57 H. W. DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, 46.

58 DRESSER: Living by the Spirit, 58.

59 DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, 33.

60 TRINE: In Tune with the Infinite, p. 214.

61 TRINE: p. 117.

62 Quoted by LEJEUNE: Introd. à la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 66.

63 HENRY WOOD: Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography, pp. 51, 70 (abridged).

64 See Appendix to this lecture for two other cases furnished me by friends.

65 Whether the various spheres or systems are ever to fuse integrally into one absolute conception, as most philosophers assume that they must, and how, if so, that conception may best be reached, are questions that only the future can answer. What is certain now is the fact of lines of disparate conception, each corresponding to some part of the world’s truth, each verified in some degree, each leaving out some part of real experience.

66 Tract on God, Man, and Happiness, Book ii. ch. x.

67 Commentary on Galatians, Philadelphia, 1891, pp. 510‐514 (abridged).

68 MOLINOS: Spiritual Guide, Book II., chaps. xvii., xviii. (abridged).

69 I say this in spite of the monistic utterances of many mind‐cure writers; for these utterances are really inconsistent with their attitude towards disease, and can easily be shown not to be logically involved in the experiences of union with a higher Presence with which they connect themselves. The higher Presence, namely, need not be the absolute whole of things, it is quite sufficient for the life of religious experience to regard it as a part, if only it be the most ideal part.

70 Cf. J. MILSAND: Luther et le Serf‐Arbitre, 1884, _passim_.

71 He adds with characteristic healthy‐mindedness: “Our business is to continue to fail in good spirits.”

72 The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of this world. To our own consciousness there is usually a residuum of worth left over after our sins and errors have been told off—our capacity of acknowledging and regretting them is the germ of a better self _in posse_ at least. But the world deals with us _in actu_ and not _in posse_: and of this hidden germ, not to be guessed at from without, it never takes account. Then we turn to the All‐ knower, who knows our bad, but knows this good in us also, and who is just. We cast ourselves with our repentance on his mercy: only by an All‐knower can we finally be judged. So the need of a God very definitely emerges from this sort of experience of life.

73 E.g., Iliad, XVII. 446: “Nothing then is more wretched anywhere than man of all that breathes and creeps upon this earth.”

74 E.g., Theognis, 425‐428: “Best of all for all things upon earth is it not to be born nor to behold the splendors of the Sun; next best to traverse as soon as possible the gates of Hades.” See also the almost identical passage in Œdipus in Colonus, 1225.—The Anthology is full of pessimistic utterances: “Naked came I upon the earth, naked I go below the ground—why then do I vainly toil when I see the end naked before me?”—“How did I come to be? Whence am I? Wherefore did I come? To pass away. How can I learn aught when naught I know? Being naught I came to life: once more shall I be what I was. Nothing and nothingness is the whole race of mortals.”—“For death we are all cherished and fattened like a herd of hogs that is wantonly butchered.”

The difference between Greek pessimism and the oriental and modern variety is that the Greeks had not made the discovery that the pathetic mood may be idealized, and figure as a higher form of sensibility. Their spirit was still too essentially masculine for pessimism to be elaborated or lengthily dwelt on in their classic literature. They would have despised a life set wholly in a minor key, and summoned it to keep within the proper bounds of lachrymosity. The discovery that the enduring emphasis, so far as this world goes, may be laid on its pain and failure, was reserved for races more complex, and (so to speak) more feminine than the Hellenes had attained to being in the classic period. But all the same was the outlook of those Hellenes blackly pessimistic.

75 For instance, on the very day on which I write this page, the post brings me some aphorisms from a worldly‐wise old friend in Heidelberg which may serve as a good contemporaneous expression of Epicureanism: “By the word ‘happiness’ every human being understands something different. It is a phantom pursued only by weaker minds. The wise man is satisfied with the more modest but much more definite term _contentment_. What education should chiefly aim at is to save us from a discontented life. Health is one favoring condition, but by no means an indispensable one, of contentment. Woman’s heart and love are a shrewd device of Nature, a trap which she sets for the average man, to force him into working. But the wise man will always prefer work chosen by himself.”

76 RIBOT: Psychologie des sentiments, p. 54.

77 A. GRATRY: Souvenirs de ma jeunesse, 1880, pp. 119‐121, abridged. Some persons are affected with anhedonia permanently, or at any rate with a loss of the usual appetite for life. The annals of suicide supply such examples as the following:—

An uneducated domestic servant, aged nineteen, poisons herself, and leaves two letters expressing her motive for the act. To her parents she writes:—

“Life is sweet perhaps to some, but I prefer what is sweeter than life, and that is death. So good‐by forever, my dear parents. It is nobody’s fault, but a strong desire of my own which I have longed to fulfill for three or four years. I have always had a hope that some day I might have an opportunity of fulfilling it, and now it has come.... It is a wonder I have put this off so long, but I thought perhaps I should cheer up a bit and put all thought out of my head.” To her brother she writes: “Good‐by forever, my own dearest brother. By the time you get this I shall be gone forever. I know, dear love, there is no forgiveness for what I am going to do.... I am tired of living, so am willing to die.... Life may be sweet to some, but death to me is sweeter.” S. A. K. STRAHAN: Suicide and Insanity, 2d edition, London, 1894, p. 131.

78 ROUBINOVITCH ET TOULOUSE: La Mélancolie, 1897, p. 170, abridged.

79 I cull these examples from the work of G. DUMAS: La Tristesse et la Joie, 1900.

80 My extracts are from the French translation by “ZONIA.” In abridging I have taken the liberty of transposing one passage.

81 Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners: I have printed a number of detached passages continuously.

82 The Life and Journal of the Rev. Mr. Henry Alline, Boston, 1806, pp. 25, 26. I owe my acquaintance with this book to my colleague, Dr. Benjamin Rand.

83 Compare Bunyan: “There was I struck into a very great trembling, insomuch that at some times I could, for days together, feel my very body, as well as my mind, to shake and totter under the sense of the dreadful judgment of God, that should fall on those that have sinned that most fearful and unpardonable sin. I felt also such clogging and heat at my stomach, by reason of this my terror, that I was, especially at some times, as if my breast‐bone would have split asunder.... Thus did I wind, and twine, and shrink, under the burden that was upon me; which burden also did so oppress me that I could neither stand, nor go, nor lie, either at rest or quiet.”

84 For another case of fear equally sudden, see HENRY JAMES: Society the Redeemed Form of Man, Boston, 1879, pp. 43 ff.

85 Example: “It was about eleven o’clock at night ... but I strolled on still with the people.... Suddenly upon the left side of our road, a crackling was heard among the bushes; all of us were alarmed, and in an instant a tiger, rushing out of the jungle, pounced upon the one of the party that was foremost, and carried him off in the twinkling of an eye. The rush of the animal, and the crush of the poor victim’s bones in his mouth, and his last cry of distress, ‘Ho hai!’ involuntarily reëchoed by all of us, was over in three seconds; and then I know not what happened till I returned to my senses, when I found myself and companions lying down on the ground as if prepared to be devoured by our enemy, the sovereign of the forest. I find my pen incapable of describing the terror of that dreadful moment. Our limbs stiffened, our power of speech ceased, and our hearts beat violently, and only a whisper of the same ‘Ho hai!’ was heard from us. In this state we crept on all fours for some distance back, and then ran for life with the speed of an Arab horse for about half an hour, and fortunately happened to come to a small village.... After this every one of us was attacked with fever, attended with shivering, in which deplorable state we remained till morning.”—Autobiography of Lutfullah, a Mohammedan Gentleman, Leipzig, 1857, p. 112.

86 E.g., “Our young people are diseased with the theological problems of original sin, origin of evil, predestination, and the like. These never presented a practical difficulty to any man—never darkened across any man’s road, who did not go out of his way to seek them. These are the soul’s mumps, and measles, and whooping‐coughs,” etc. EMERSON: “Spiritual Laws.”

87 Notes sur la Vie, p. 1.