Chapter 43

139 These reports of sensorial photism shade off into what are evidently only metaphorical accounts of the sense of new spiritual illumination, as, for instance, in Brainerd’s statement: “As I was walking in a thick grove, unspeakable glory seemed to open to the apprehension of my soul. I do not mean any external brightness, for I saw no such thing, nor any imagination of a body of light in the third heavens, or anything of that nature, but it was a new inward apprehension or view that I had of God.”

In a case like this next one from Starbuck’s manuscript collection, the lighting up of the darkness is probably also metaphorical:—

“One Sunday night, I resolved that when I got home to the ranch where I was working, I would offer myself with my faculties and all to God to be used only by and for him.... It was raining and the roads were muddy; but this desire grew so strong that I kneeled down by the side of the road and told God all about it, intending then to get up and go on. Such a thing as any special answer to my prayer never entered my mind, having been converted by faith, but still being most undoubtedly saved. Well, while I was praying, I remember holding out my hands to God and telling him they should work for him, my feet walk for him, my tongue speak for him, etc., etc., if he would only use me as his instrument and give me a satisfying experience—when suddenly the darkness of the night seemed lit up—I felt, realized, knew, that God heard and answered my prayer. Deep happiness came over me; I felt I was accepted into the inner circle of God’s loved ones.”

In the following case also the flash of light is metaphorical:—

“A prayer meeting had been called for at close of evening service. The minister supposed me impressed by his discourse (a mistake—he was dull). He came and, placing his hand upon my shoulder, said: ‘Do you not want to give your heart to God?’ I replied in the affirmative. Then said he, ‘Come to the front seat.’ They sang and prayed and talked with me. I experienced nothing but unaccountable wretchedness. They declared that the reason why I did not ‘obtain peace’ was because I was not willing to give up all to God. After about two hours the minister said we would go home. As usual, on retiring, I prayed. In great distress, I at this time simply said, ‘Lord, I have done all I can, I leave the whole matter with thee.’ Immediately, like a flash of light, there came to me a great peace, and I arose and went into my parents’ bedroom and said, ‘I do feel so wonderfully happy.’ This I regard as the hour of conversion. It was the hour in which I became assured of divine acceptance and favor. So far as my life was concerned, it made little immediate change.”

140 I add in a note a few more records:—

“One morning, being in deep distress, fearing every moment I should drop into hell, I was constrained to cry in earnest for mercy, and the Lord came to my relief, and delivered my soul from the burden and guilt of sin. My whole frame was in a tremor from head to foot, and my soul enjoyed sweet peace. The pleasure I then felt was indescribable. The happiness lasted about three days, during which time I never spoke to any person about my feelings.” Autobiography of DAN YOUNG, edited by W. P. STRICKLAND, New York, 1860.

“In an instant there rose up in me such a sense of God’s taking care of those who put their trust in him that for an hour all the world was crystalline, the heavens were lucid, and I sprang to my feet and began to cry and laugh.” H. W. BEECHER, quoted by LEUBA.

“My tears of sorrow changed to joy, and I lay there praising God in such ecstasy of joy as only the soul who experiences it can realize.”—“I cannot express how I felt. It was as if I had been in a dark dungeon and lifted into the light of the sun. I shouted and I sang praise unto him who loved me and washed me from my sins. I was forced to retire into a secret place, for the tears did flow, and I did not wish my shopmates to see me, and yet I could not keep it a secret.”—“I experienced joy almost to weeping.”—“I felt my face must have shone like that of Moses. I had a general feeling of buoyancy. It was the greatest joy it was ever my lot to experience.”—“I wept and laughed alternately. I was as light as if walking on air. I felt as if I had gained greater peace and happiness than I had ever expected to experience.” STARBUCK’S correspondents.

141 Psychology of Religion, pp. 360, 357.

142 SAINTE‐BEUVE: Port‐Royal, vol. i. pp. 95 and 106, abridged.

143 “ ‘Love would not be love,’ says Bourget, ‘unless it could carry one to crime.’ And so one may say that no passion would be a veritable passion unless it could carry one to crime.” (SIGHELE: Psychologie des Sectes, p. 136.) In other words, great passions annul the ordinary inhibitions set by “conscience.” And conversely, of all the criminal human beings, the false, cowardly, sensual, or cruel persons who actually live, there is perhaps not one whose criminal impulse may not be at some moment overpowered by the presence of some other emotion to which his character is also potentially liable, provided that other emotion be only made intense enough. Fear is usually the most available emotion for this result in this particular class of persons. It stands for conscience, and may here be classed appropriately as a “higher affection.” If we are soon to die, or if we believe a day of judgment to be near at hand, how quickly do we put our moral house in order—we do not see how sin can evermore exert temptation over us! Old‐fashioned hell‐fire Christianity well knew how to extract from fear its full equivalent in the way of fruits for repentance, and its full conversion value.

144 Example: Benjamin Constant was often marveled at as an extraordinary instance of superior intelligence with inferior character. He writes (Journal, Paris, 1895, p. 56), “I am tossed and dragged about by my miserable weakness. Never was anything so ridiculous as my indecision. Now marriage, now solitude; now Germany, now France, hesitation upon hesitation, and all because at bottom I am _unable to give up anything_.” He can’t “get mad” at any of his alternatives; and the career of a man beset by such an all‐round amiability is hopeless.

145 The great thing which the higher excitabilities give is _courage_; and the addition or subtraction of a certain amount of this quality makes a different man, a different life. Various excitements let the courage loose. Trustful hope will do it; inspiring example will do it; love will do it; wrath will do it. In some people it is natively so high that the mere touch of danger does it, though danger is for most men the great inhibitor of action. “Love of adventure” becomes in such persons a ruling passion. “I believe,” says General Skobeleff, “that my bravery is simply the passion and at the same time the contempt of danger. The risk of life fills me with an exaggerated rapture. The fewer there are to share it, the more I like it. The participation of my body in the event is required to furnish me an adequate excitement. Everything intellectual appears to me to be reflex; but a meeting of man to man, a duel, a danger into which I can throw myself headforemost, attracts me, moves me, intoxicates me. I am crazy for it, I love it, I adore it. I run after danger as one runs after women; I wish it never to stop. Were it always the same, it would always bring me a new pleasure. When I throw myself into an adventure in which I hope to find it, my heart palpitates with the uncertainty; I could wish at once to have it appear and yet to delay. A sort of painful and delicious shiver shakes me; my entire nature runs to meet the peril with an impetus that my will would in vain try to resist.” (JULIETTE ADAM: Le Général Skobeleff, Nouvelle Revue, 1886, abridged.) Skobeleff seems to have been a cruel egoist; but the disinterested Garibaldi, if one may judge by his “Memorie,” lived in an unflagging emotion of similar danger‐seeking excitement.

146 See the case on p. 70, above, where the writer describes his experiences of communion with the Divine as consisting “merely in the _temporary obliteration of the conventionalities_ which usually cover my life.”

147 Above, p. 201. “The only radical remedy I know for dipsomania is religiomania,” is a saying I have heard quoted from some medical man.

148 Doddridge’s Life of Colonel James Gardiner, London Religious Tract Society, pp. 23‐32.

149 Here, for example, is a case, from Starbuck’s book, in which a “sensory automatism” brought about quickly what prayers and resolves had been unable to effect. The subject is a woman. She writes:—

“When I was about forty I tried to quit smoking, but the desire was on me, and had me in its power. I cried and prayed and promised God to quit, but could not. I had smoked for fifteen years. When I was fifty‐three, as I sat by the fire one day smoking, a voice came to me. I did not hear it with my ears, but more as a dream or sort of double think. It said, ‘Louisa, lay down smoking.’ At once I replied, ‘Will you take the desire away?’ But it only kept saying: ‘Louisa, lay down smoking.’ Then I got up, laid my pipe on the mantel‐shelf, and never smoked again or had any desire to. The desire was gone as though I had never known it or touched tobacco. The sight of others smoking and the smell of smoke never gave me the least wish to touch it again.” The Psychology of Religion, p. 142.

150 Professor Starbuck expresses the radical destruction of old influences physiologically, as a cutting off of the connection between higher and lower cerebral centres. “This condition,” he says, “in which the association‐centres connected with the spiritual life are cut off from the lower, is often reflected in the way correspondents describe their experiences.... For example: ‘Temptations from without still assail me, but there is nothing _within_ to respond to them.’ The ego [here] is wholly identified with the higher centres, whose quality of feeling is that of withinness. Another of the respondents says: ‘Since then, although Satan tempts me, there is as it were a wall of brass around me, so that his darts cannot touch me.’ ”—Unquestionably, functional exclusions of this sort must occur in the cerebral organ. But on the side accessible to introspection, their causal condition is nothing but the degree of spiritual excitement, getting at last so high and strong as to be sovereign; and it must be frankly confessed that we do not know just why or how such sovereignty comes about in one person and not in another. We can only give our imagination a certain delusive help by mechanical analogies.

If we should conceive, for example, that the human mind, with its different possibilities of equilibrium, might be like a many‐sided solid with different surfaces on which it could lie flat, we might liken mental revolutions to the spatial revolutions of such a body. As it is pried up, say by a lever, from a position in which it lies on surface A, for instance, it will linger for a time unstably halfway up, and if the lever cease to urge it, it will tumble back or “relapse” under the continued pull of gravity. But if at last it rotate far enough for its centre of gravity to pass beyond surface A altogether, the body will fall over, on surface B, say, and abide there permanently. The pulls of gravity towards A have vanished, and may now be disregarded. The polyhedron has become immune against farther attraction from their direction.

In this figure of speech the lever may correspond to the emotional influences making for a new life, and the initial pull of gravity to the ancient drawbacks and inhibitions. So long as the emotional influence fails to reach a certain pitch of efficacy, the changes it produces are unstable, and the man relapses into his original attitude. But when a certain intensity is attained by the new emotion, a critical point is passed, and there then ensues an irreversible revolution, equivalent to the production of a new nature.

151 I use this word in spite of a certain flavor of “sanctimoniousness” which sometimes clings to it, because no other word suggests as well the exact combination of affections which the text goes on to describe.

152 “It will be found,” says Dr. W. R. INGE (in his lectures on Christian Mysticism, London, 1899, p. 326), “that men of preëminent saintliness agree very closely in what they tell us. They tell us that they have arrived at an unshakable conviction, not based on inference but on immediate experience, that God is a spirit with whom the human spirit can hold intercourse; that in him meet all that they can imagine of goodness, truth, and beauty; that they can see his footprints everywhere in nature, and feel his presence within them as the very life of their life, so that in proportion as they come to themselves they come to him. They tell us what separates us from him and from happiness is, first, self‐seeking in all its forms; and, secondly, sensuality in all its forms; that these are the ways of darkness and death, which hide from us the face of God; while the path of the just is like a shining light, which shineth more and more unto the perfect day.”

153 The “enthusiasm of humanity” may lead to a life which coalesces in many respects with that of Christian saintliness. Take the following rules proposed to members of the Union pour l’Action morale, in the Bulletin de l’Union, April 1‐15, 1894. See, also, Revue Bleue, August 13, 1892.

“We would make known in our own persons the usefulness of rule, of discipline, of resignation and renunciation; we would teach the necessary perpetuity of suffering, and explain the creative part which it plays. We would wage war upon false optimism; on the base hope of happiness coming to us ready made; on the notion of a salvation by knowledge alone, or by material civilization alone, vain symbol as this is of civilization, precarious external arrangement, ill‐fitted to replace the intimate union and consent of souls. We would wage war also on bad morals, whether in public or in private life; on luxury, fastidiousness, and over‐refinement; on all that tends to increase the painful, immoral, and anti‐social multiplication of our wants; on all that excites envy and dislike in the soul of the common people, and confirms the notion that the chief end of life is freedom to enjoy. We would preach by our example the respect of superiors and equals, the respect of all men; affectionate simplicity in our relations with inferiors and insignificant persons; indulgence where our own claims only are concerned, but firmness in our demands where they relate to duties towards others or towards the public.

“For the common people are what we help them to become; their vices are our vices, gazed upon, envied, and imitated; and if they come back with all their weight upon us, it is but just.”

154 Above, pp. 248 ff.

155 H. THOREAU: Walden, Riverside edition, p. 206, abridged.

156 C. H. HILTY: Glück, vol. i. p. 85.

157 The Mystery of Pain and Death, London, 1892, p. 258.

158 Compare Madame Guyon: “It was my practice to arise at midnight for purposes of devotion.... It seemed to me that God came at the precise time and woke me from sleep in order that I might enjoy him. When I was out of health or greatly fatigued, he did not awake me, but at such times I felt, even in my sleep, a singular possession of God. He loved me so much that he seemed to pervade my being, at a time when I could be only imperfectly conscious of his presence. My sleep is sometimes broken,—a sort of half sleep; but my soul seems to be awake enough to know God, when it is hardly capable of knowing anything else.” T. C. UPHAM: The Life and Religious Experiences of Madame de la Mothe Guyon, New York, 1877, vol. i. p. 260.

159 I have considerably abridged the words of the original, which is given in EDWARDS’S Narrative of the Revival in New England.

160 BOUGAUD: Hist. de la Bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, 1894, p. 125.

161 Paris, 1900.

162 Page 130.

163 Page 167.

164 Op. cit., p. 127.

165 The barrier between men and animals also. We read of Towianski, an eminent Polish patriot and mystic, that “one day one of his friends met him in the rain, caressing a big dog which was jumping upon him and covering him horribly with mud. On being asked why he permitted the animal thus to dirty his clothes, Towianski replied: ‘This dog, whom I am now meeting for the first time, has shown a great fellow‐ feeling for me, and a great joy in my recognition and acceptance of his greetings. Were I to drive him off, I should wound his feelings and do him a moral injury. It would be an offense not only to him, but to all the spirits of the other world who are on the same level with him. The damage which he does to my coat is as nothing in comparison with the wrong which I should inflict upon him, in case I were to remain indifferent to the manifestations of his friendship. We ought,’ he added, ‘both to lighten the condition of animals, whenever we can, and at the same time to facilitate in ourselves that union of the world of all spirits, which the sacrifice of Christ has made possible.’ ” André Towianski, Traduction de l’Italien, Turin, 1897 (privately printed). I owe my knowledge of this book and of Towianski to my friend Professor W. Lutoslawski, author of “Plato’s Logic.”

166 J. PATTERSON’S Life of Richard Weaver, pp. 66‐68, abridged.

167 As where the future Buddha, incarnated as a hare, jumps into the fire to cook himself for a meal for a beggar—having previously shaken himself three times, so that none of the insects in his fur should perish with him.

168 Bulletin de l’Union pour l’Action Morale, September, 1894.

169 B. PASCAL: Prières pour les Maladies, §§ xiii., xiv., abridged.

170 From THOMAS C. UPHAM’S Life and Religious Opinions and Experiences of Madame de la Mothe Guyon, New York, 1877, ii. 48, i. 141, 413, abridged.

171 Op. cit., London, 1901, p. 130.

172 CLAPARÈDE et GOTY: Deux Héroines de la Foi, Paris, 1880, p. 112.

173 Compare these three different statements of it: A. P. CALL: As a Matter of Course, Boston, 1894; H. W. DRESSER: Living by the Spirit, New York and London, 1900; H. W. SMITH: The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life, published by the Willard Tract Repository, and now in thousands of hands.

174 T. C. UPHAM: Life of Madame Catharine Adorna, 3d ed., New York, 1864, pp. 158, 172‐174.

175 The History of THOMAS ELWOOD, written by Himself, London, 1885, pp. 32‐34.

176 Memoirs of W.E. Channing, Boston, 1840, i. 196.

177 L. TYERMAN: The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, i. 274.

178 A. MOUNIN: Le Curé d’Ars, Vie de M. J. B. M. Vianney, 1864, p. 545, abridged.

179 B. WENDELL: Cotton Mather, New York, no date, p. 198.

180 That of the earlier Jesuit, RODRIGUEZ, which has been translated into all languages, is one of the best known. A convenient modern manual, very well put together, is L’Ascétique Chrétienne, by M. J. RIBET, Paris, Poussielgue, nouvelle édition, 1898.

181 SAINT JEAN DE LA CROIX, Vie et Œuvres, Paris, 1893, ii. 94, 99, abridged.

182 “Insects,” i.e. lice, were an unfailing token of mediæval sainthood. We read of Francis of Assisi’s sheepskin that “often a companion of the saint would take it to the fire to clean and _dispediculate_ it, doing so, as he said, because the seraphic father himself was no enemy of _pedocchi_, but on the contrary kept them on him (le portava adosso), and held it for an honor and a glory to wear these celestial pearls in his habit.” Quoted by P. SABATIER: Speculum Perfectionis, etc., Paris, 1898, p. 231, note.

183 The Life of the Blessed HENRY SUSO, by Himself, translated by T. F. KNOX, London, 1865, pp. 56‐80, abridged.

184 BOUGAUD: Hist. de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894, pp. 265, 171. Compare, also, pp. 386, 387.

185 LEJEUNE: Introduction à la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 277. The holocaust simile goes back at least as far as Ignatius Loyola.

186 ALFONSO RODRIGUEZ, S. J.: Pratique de la Perfection Chrétienne, Part iii., Treatise v., ch. x.

187 Letters li. and cxx. of the collection translated into French by BOUIX, Paris, 1870.

188 BARTOLI‐MICHEL, ii. 13.

189 RODRIGUEZ: Op. cit., Part iii., Treatise v., ch. vi.

190 SAINTE‐BEUVE: Histoire de Port Royal, i. 346.

191 RODRIGUEZ: Op. cit., Part iii., Treatise iii., chaps. vi., vii.

192 R. PHILIP: The Life and Times of George Whitefield, London, 1842, p. 366.

193 EDWARD CARPENTER: Towards Democracy, p. 362, abridged.

194 Speculum Perfectionis, ed. P. SABATIER, Paris, 1898, pp. 10, 13.

195 An Apology for M. Antonia Bourignon, London, 1699, pp. 269, 270, abridged.

Another example from Starbuck’s MS. collection:—

“At a meeting held at six the next morning, I heard a man relate his experience. He said: The Lord asked him if he would confess Christ among the quarrymen with whom he worked, and he said he would. Then he asked him if he would give up to be used of the Lord the four hundred dollars he had laid up, and he said he would, and thus the Lord saved him. The thought came to me at once that I had never made a real consecration either of myself or of my property to the Lord, but had always tried to serve the Lord in _my_ way. Now the Lord asked me if I would serve him in _his_ way, and go out alone and penniless if he so ordered. The question was pressed home, and I must decide: To forsake all and have him, or have all and lose him! I soon decided to take him; and the blessed assurance came, that he had taken me for his own, and my joy was full. I returned home from the meeting with feelings as simple as a child. I thought all would be glad to hear of the joy of the Lord that possessed me, and so I began to tell the simple story. But to my great surprise, the pastors (for I attended meetings in three churches) opposed the experience and said it was fanaticism, and one told the members of his church to shun those that professed it, and I soon found that my foes were those of my own household.”

196 J. J. CHAPMAN, in the Political Nursery, vol. iv. p. 4, April, 1900, abridged.

197 GEORGE FOX: Journal, Philadelphia, 1800, pp. 59‐61, abridged.