|
[21]
Example: "I have had much
comfort lately in meditating on the passages which show the personality of
the Holy Ghost, and his distinctness from the Father and the Son.
It is a subject that requires searching into to find out, but, when
realized, gives one so much more true and lively a sense of the fullness of
the Godhead, and its work in us and to us, than when only thinking of the
Spirit in its effect on us." Augustus Hare: Memorials,
i. 244, Maria Hare to Lucy H. Hare.
Immanuel
Kant held a curious doctrine about such objects of belief as God, the design
of creation, the soul, its freedom, and the life hereafter.
These things, he said, are properly not objects of knowledge at all.
Our conceptions always require a sense-content to work with, and as
the words soul," "God,"
"immortality," cover no distinctive sense-content whatever, it
follows that theoretically speaking they are words devoid of any
significance. Yet strangely enough they have a definite meaning FOR OUR
PRACTICE. We can act AS IF
there were a God; feel AS IF we were free; consider Nature AS IF she were
full of special designs; lay plans AS IF we were to be immortal; and we find
then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life. Our faith THAT these unintelligible objects actually exist
proves thus to be a full equivalent in praktischer Hinsicht, as Kant calls
it, or from the point of view of our action, for a knowledge of WHAT they
might be, in case we were permitted positively to conceive them.
So we have the strange phenomenon, as Kant assures us, of a mind
believing with all its strength in the real presence of a set of things of
no one of which it can form any notion whatsoever.
My
object in thus recalling Kant's doctrine to your mind is not to express any
opinion as to the accuracy of this particularly uncouth part of his
philosophy, but only to illustrate the characteristic of human nature which
we are considering, by an example so classical in its exaggeration.
The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our
object of belief that our whole life is polarized through and through, so to
speak, by its sense of the existence of the thing believed in, and yet that
thing, for purpose of definite description, can hardly be said to be present
to our mind at all. It is as if a bar of iron, without touch or sight, with no
representative faculty whatever, might nevertheless be strongly endowed with
an inner capacity for magnetic feeling; and as if, through the various
arousals of its magnetism by magnets coming and going in its neighborhood,
it might be consciously determined to different attitudes and tendencies.
Such a bar of iron could never give you an outward description of the
agencies that had the power of stirring it so strongly; yet of their
presence, and of their significance for its life, it would be intensely
aware through every fibre of its being.
It
is not only the Ideas of pure Reason as Kant styled them, that have this
power of making us vitally feel presences that we are impotent articulately
to describe. All sorts of
higher abstractions bring with them the same kind of impalpable appeal.
Remember those passages from Emerson which I read at my last lecture.
The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims, not
only for such a transcendentalist writer, but for all of us, in a wider and
higher universe of abstract ideas, that lend it its significance.
As time, space, and the ether soak through all things so (we feel) do
abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance, justice,
soak through all things good, strong, significant, and just.
Such
ideas, and others equally abstract, form the background for all our facts,
the fountain-head of all the possibilities we conceive of.
They give its "nature," as we call it, to every special
thing. Everything we know is
"what" it is by sharing in the nature of one of these
abstractions. We can never look
directly at them, for they are bodiless and featureless and footless, but we
grasp all other things by their means, and in handling the real world we
should be stricken with helplessness in just so far forth as we might lose
these mental objects, these adjectives and adverbs and predicates and heads
of classification and conception.
This
absolute determinability of our mind by abstractions is one of the cardinal
facts in our human constitution. Polarizing and magnetizing us as they do,
we turn towards them and from them, we seek them, hold them, hate them,
bless them, just as if they were so many concrete beings. And beings they
are, beings as real in the realm which they inhabit as the changing things
of sense are in the realm of space.
Plato
gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common human feeling,
that the doctrine of the reality of abstract objects has been known as the
platonic theory of ideas ever since. Abstract
Beauty, for example, is for Plato a perfectly definite individual being, of
which the intellect is aware as of something additional to all the perishing
beauties of the earth. "The
true order of going," he says, in the often quoted passage in his
"Banquet," "is to use the beauties of earth as steps along
which one mounts upwards for the sake of that other Beauty, going from one
to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions,
and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair notions, he arrives
at the notion of absolute Beauty, and at last knows what the essence of
Beauty is."[22] In our
last lecture we had a glimpse of the way in which a platonizing writer like
Emerson may treat the abstract divineness of things, the moral structure of
the universe, as a fact worthy of worship.
In those various churches without a God which to-day are spreading
through the world under the name of ethical societies, we have a similar
worship of the abstract divine, the moral law believed in as an ultimate
object. "Science" in
many minds is genuinely taking the place of a religion.
Where this is so, the scientist treats the "Laws of Nature"
as objective facts to be revered. A
brilliant school of interpretation of Greek mythology would have it that in
their origin the Greek gods were only half-metaphoric personifications of
those great spheres of abstract law and order into which the natural world
falls apart--the sky-sphere, the ocean-sphere, the earth-sphere, and the
like; just as even now we may speak of the smile of the morning, the kiss of
the breeze, or the bite of the cold, without really meaning that these
phenomena of nature actually wear a human face.[23]
[22]
Symposium, Jowett, 1871, i. 527.
[23]
Example: "Nature is always
so interesting, under whatever aspect she shows herself, that when it rains,
I seem to see a beautiful woman weeping.
She appears the more beautiful, the more afflicted she is."
B. de St. Pierre.
As
regards the origin of the Greek gods, we need not at present seek an
opinion. But the whole array of
our instances leads to a conclusion something like this: It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of
reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call
"something there," more deep and more general than any of the
special and particular "senses" by which the current psychology
supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.
If this were so, we might suppose the senses to waken our attitudes
and conduct as they so habitually do, by first exciting this sense of
reality; but anything else, any idea, for example, that might similarly
excite it, would have that same prerogative of appearing real which objects
of sense normally possess. So
far as religious conceptions were able to touch this reality-feeling, they
would be believed in in spite of criticism, even though they might be so
vague and remote as to be almost unimaginable, even though they might be
such non-entities in point of WHATNESS, as Kant makes the objects of his
moral theology to be.
The
most curious proofs of the existence of such an undifferentiated sense of
reality as this are found in experiences of hallucination.
It often happens that an hallucination is imperfectly developed:
the person affected will feel a "presence" in the room,
definitely localized, facing in one particular way, real in the most
emphatic sense of the word, often coming suddenly, and as suddenly gone; and
yet neither seen, heard, touched, nor cognized in any of the usual
"sensible" ways. Let
me give you an example of this, before I pass to the objects with whose
presence religion is more peculiarly concerned.
An
intimate friend of mine, one of the keenest intellects I know, has had
several experiences of this sort. He
writes as follows in response to my inquiries:--<59>
"I
have several times within the past few years felt the so- called
'consciousness of a presence.' The
experiences which I have in mind are clearly distinguishable from another
kind of experience which I have had very frequently, and which I fancy many
persons would also call the 'consciousness of a presence.' But the
difference for me between the two sets of experience is as great as the
difference between feeling a slight warmth originating I know not where, and
standing in the midst of a conflagration with all the ordinary senses alert.
"It
was about September, 1884, when I had the first experience. On the previous
night I had had, after getting into bed at my rooms in College, a vivid
tactile hallucination of being grasped by the arm, which made me get up and
search the room for an intruder; but the sense of presence properly so
called came on the next night. After
I had got into bed and blown out the candle, I lay awake awhile thinking on
the previous night's experience, when suddenly I FELT something come into
the room and stay close to my bed. It
remained only a minute or two. I
did not recognize it by any ordinary sense and yet there was a horribly
unpleasant 'sensation' connected with it.
It stirred something more at the roots of my being than any ordinary
perception. The feeling had something of the quality of a very large
tearing vital pain spreading chiefly over the chest, but within the
organism--and yet the feeling was not PAIN so much as ABHORRENCE. At all events, something was present with me, and I knew its
presence far more surely than I have ever known the presence of any fleshly
living creature. I was
conscious of its departure as of its coming:
an almost instantaneously swift going through the door, and the
'horrible sensation' disappeared.
"On
the third night when I retired my mind was absorbed in some lectures which I
was preparing, and I was still absorbed in these when I became aware of the
actual presence (though not of the COMING) of the thing that was there the
night before, and of the 'horrible sensation.' I then mentally concentrated
all my effort to charge this 'thing,' if it was evil to depart, if it was
NOT evil, to tell me who or what it was, and if it could not explain itself,
to go, and that I would compel it <60> to go.
It went as on the previous night, and my body quickly recovered its
normal state.
"On
two other occasions in my life I have had precisely the same 'horrible
sensation.' Once it lasted a
full quarter of an hour. In all
three instances the certainty that there in outward space there stood
SOMETHING was indescribably STRONGER than the ordinary certainty of
companionship when we are in the close presence of ordinary living people. The something seemed close to me, and intensely more real
than any ordinary perception. Although I felt it to be like unto myself so
to speak, or finite, small, and distressful, as it were, I didn't recognize
it as any individual being or person."
Of
course such an experience as this does not connect itself with the religious
sphere. Yet it may upon
occasion do so; and the same correspondent informs me that at more than one
other conjuncture he had the sense of presence developed with equal
intensity and abruptness, only then it was filled with a quality of joy.
"There
was not a mere consciousness of something there, but fused in the central
happiness of it, a startling awareness of some ineffable good.
Not vague either, not like the emotional effect of some poem, or
scene, or blossom, of music, but the sure knowledge of the close presence of
a sort of mighty person, and after it went, the memory persisted as the one
perception of reality. Everything
else might be a dream, but not that."
My
friend, as it oddly happens, does not interpret these latter experiences
theistically, as signifying the presence of God. But it would clearly not have been unnatural to interpret
them as a revelation of the deity's existence.
When we reach the subject of mysticism, we shall have much more to
say upon this head.
Lest
the oddity of these phenomena should disconcert you, I will venture to read
you a couple of similar narratives, much shorter, merely to show that we are
dealing with a well-marked natural kind of fact. In the first case, which I <61> take from the Journal
of the Society for Psychical Research, the sense of presence developed in a
few moments into a distinctly visualized hallucination--but I leave that
part of the story out.
"I
had read," the narrator says, "some twenty minutes or so, was
thoroughly absorbed in the book, my mind was perfectly quiet, and for the
time being my friends were quite forgotten, when suddenly without a moment's
warning my whole being seemed roused to the highest state of tension or
aliveness, and I was aware, with an intenseness not easily imagined by those
who had never experienced it, that another being or presence was not only in
the room, but quite close to me. I
put my book down, and although my excitement was great, I felt quite
collected, and not conscious of any sense of fear.
Without changing my position, and looking straight at the fire, I
knew somehow that my friend A. H. was standing at my left elbow but so far
behind me as to be hidden by the armchair in which I was leaning back.
Moving my eyes round slightly without otherwise changing my position,
the lower portion of one leg became visible, and I instantly recognized the
gray-blue material of trousers he often wore, but the stuff appeared
semitransparent, reminding me of tobacco smoke in consistency,"[24]--
and hereupon the visual hallucination came.
[24]
Journal of the S. P. R., February, 1895, p. 26.
Another
informant writes:--
"Quite
early in the night I was awakened. . . . I felt as if I had been aroused
intentionally, and at first thought some one was breaking into the house. .
. . I then turned on my side to go to sleep again, and immediately felt a
consciousness of a presence in the room, and singular to state, it was not
the consciousness of a live person, but of a spiritual presence.
This may provoke a smile, but I can only tell you the facts as they
occurred to me. I do not know
how to better describe my sensations than by simply stating that I felt a
consciousness of a spiritual presence. . . .
I felt also at the same time a strong feeling of superstitious dread,
as if something strange and fearful were about to happen."[25]
[25]
E. Gurney: Phantasms of the
Living, i. 384.
Professor
Flournoy of Geneva gives me the following testimony of a friend of his, a
lady, who has the gift of automatic or involuntary writing:--
"Whenever
I practice automatic writing, what makes me feel that it is not due to a
subconscious self is the feeling I always have of a foreign presence,
external to my body. It is
sometimes so definitely characterized that I could point to its exact
position. This impression of
presence is impossible to describe. It varies in intensity and clearness
according to the personality from whom the writing professes to come.
If it is some one whom I love, I feel it immediately, before any
writing has come. My heart
seems to recognize it."
In
an earlier book of mine I have cited at full length a curious case of
presence felt by a blind man. The
presence was that of the figure of a gray-bearded man dressed in a pepper
and salt suit, squeezing himself under the crack of the door and moving
across the floor of the room towards a sofa.
The blind subject of this quasi-hallucination is an exceptionally
intelligent reporter. He is
entirely without internal visual imagery and cannot represent light or
colors to himself, and is positive that his other senses, hearing, etc.,
were not involved in this false perception.
It seems to have been an abstract conception rather, with the
feelings of reality and spatial outwardness directly attached to it--in
other words, a fully objectified and exteriorized IDEA.
Such
cases, taken along with others which would be too tedious for quotation,
seem sufficiently to prove the existence in our mental machinery of a sense
of present reality more diffused and general than that which our special
senses yield. For the
psychologists the tracing of the organic seat of such a feeling would form a
pretty problem--nothing could be more natural than to connect it with the
muscular sense, with the feeling that our muscles were innervating
themselves for action. Whatsoever
thus innervated our activity, or "made our flesh creep"--our
senses are what do so oftenest--might then appear real and present, even
though it were but an abstract idea. But
with such vague conjectures we have no concern at present, for our interest
lies with the faculty rather than with its organic seat.
Like
all positive affections of consciousness, the sense of reality has its
negative counterpart in the shape of a feeling of unreality by which persons
may be haunted, and of which one sometimes hears complaint:--
"When
I reflect on the fact that I have made my appearance by accident upon a
globe itself whirled through space as the sport of the catastrophes of the
heavens," says Madame Ackermann; "when I see myself surrounded by
beings as ephemeral and incomprehensible as I am myself, and all excitedly
pursuing pure chimeras, I experience a strange feeling of being in a dream.
It seems to me as if I have loved and suffered and that erelong I
shall die, in a dream. My last word will be, 'I have been dreaming.'"[26]
[26]
Pensees d'un Solitaire, p. 66.
In
another lecture we shall see how in morbid melancholy this sense of the
unreality of things may become a carking pain, and even lead to suicide.
We
may now lay it down as certain that in the distinctively religious sphere of
experience, many persons (how many we cannot tell) possess the objects of
their belief, not in the form of mere conceptions which their intellect
accepts as true, but rather in the form of quasi-sensible realities directly
apprehended. As his sense of
the real presence of these objects fluctuates, so the believer alternates
between warmth and coldness in his faith.
Other examples will bring this home to one better than abstract
description, so I proceed immediately to cite some.
The first example is a negative one, deploring the loss of the sense
in question. I have extracted
it from an account given me by a scientific man of my acquaintance, of his
religious life. It seems to me
to show clearly that the feeling of reality may be something more like a
sensation than an intellectual operation properly so-called.
"Between
twenty and thirty I gradually became more and more agnostic and irreligious,
yet I cannot say that I ever lost that 'indefinite consciousness' which
Herbert Spencer describes so well, of an Absolute Reality behind phenomena.
For me this Reality was not the pure Unknowable of Spencer's
philosophy, for although I had ceased my childish prayers to God, and never
prayed to IT in a formal manner, yet my more recent experience shows me to
have been in a relation to IT which practically was the same thing as
prayer. Whenever I had any
trouble, especially when I had conflict with other people, either
domestically or in the way of business, or when I was depressed in spirits
or anxious about affairs, I now recognize that I used to fall back for
support upon this curious relation I felt myself to be in to this
fundamental cosmical IT. It was
on my side, or I was on Its side, however you please to term it, in the
particular trouble, and it always strengthened me and seemed to give me
endless vitality to feel its underlying and supporting presence.
In fact, it was an unfailing fountain of living justice, truth, and
strength, to which I instinctively turned at times of weakness, and it
always brought me out. I know
now that it was a personal relation I was in to it, because of late years
the power of communicating with it has left me, and I am conscious of a
perfectly definite loss. I used never to fail to find it when I turned to it.
Then came a set of years when sometimes I found it, and then again I
would be wholly unable to make connection with it.
I remember many occasions on which at night in bed, I would be unable
to get to sleep on account of worry. I
turned this way and that in the darkness, and groped mentally for the
familiar sense of that higher mind of my mind which had always seemed to be
close at hand as it were, closing the passage, and yielding support, but
there was no electric current. A blank was there instead of IT:
I couldn't find anything. Now,
at the age of nearly fifty, my power of getting into connection with it has
entirely left me; and I have to confess that a great help has gone out of my
life. Life has become curiously
dead and <65> indifferent; and I can now see that my old experience
was probably exactly the same thing as the prayers of the orthodox, only I
did not call them by that name. What
I have spoken of as 'It' was practically not Spencer's Unknowable, but just
my own instinctive and individual God, whom I relied upon for higher
sympathy, but whom somehow I have lost."
Nothing
is more common in the pages of religious biography than the way in which
seasons of lively and of difficult faith are described as alternating.
Probably every religious person has the recollection of particular
crisis in which a directer vision of the truth, a direct perception,
perhaps, of a living God's existence, swept in and overwhelmed the languor
of the more ordinary belief. In James Russell Lowell's correspondence there is a brief
memorandum of an experience of this kind:--
"I
had a revelation last Friday evening. I
was at Mary's, and happening to say something of the presence of spirits (of
whom, I said, I was often dimly aware), Mr. Putnam entered into an argument
with me on spiritual matters. As
I was speaking, the whole system rose up before me like a vague destiny
looming from the Abyss. I never
before so clearly felt the Spirit of God in me and around rue.
The whole room seemed to me full of God. The air seemed to waver to and fro with the presence of
Something I knew not what. I
spoke with the calmness and clearness of a prophet.
I cannot tell you what this revelation was.
I have not yet studied it enough.
But I shall perfect it one day, and then you shall hear it and
acknowledge its grandeur."[27]
[27]
Letters of Lowell, i. 75.
<66>
Here is a longer and more developed experience from a manuscript
communication by a clergyman--I take it from Starbuck's manuscript
collection:--
"I
remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hill-top, where my soul
opened out, as it were, into the Infinite, and there was a rushing together
of the two worlds, the inner and the outer.
It was deep calling unto deep--the deep that my own struggle had
opened up within being answered by the unfathomable deep without, reaching
beyond the stars. I stood alone
with Him who had made me, and all the beauty of the world, and love, and
sorrow, and even temptation. I
did not seek Him, but felt the perfect unison of my spirit with His.
The ordinary sense of things around me faded. For the moment nothing but an ineffable joy and exultation
remained. It is impossible
fully to describe the experience. It
was like the effect of some great orchestra when all the separate notes have
melted into one swelling harmony that leaves the listener conscious of
nothing save that his soul is being wafted upwards, and almost bursting with
its own emotion. The perfect
stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence.
The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it
was not seen. I could not any
more have doubted that HE was there than that I was.
Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two.
"My
highest faith in God and truest idea of him were then born in me.
I have stood upon the Mount of Vision since, and felt the Eternal
round about me. But never since
has there come quite the same stirring of the heart.
Then, if ever, I believe, I stood face to face with God, and was born
anew of his spirit. There was, as I recall it, no sudden change of thought
or of belief, except that my early crude conception, had, as it were burst
into flower. There was no
destruction of the old, but a rapid, wonderful unfolding.
Since that time no discussion that I have heard of the proofs of
God's existence has been able to shake my faith.
Having once felt the presence of God's spirit, I have never lost it
again for long. My most
assuring evidence of his existence is deeply rooted in that hour of vision
in the memory of that supreme experience, and in the conviction, gained from
reading and reflection, that something the same has come to all who have
found God. I am aware that it
may justly be called mystical. I
am not enough acquainted with philosophy to defend it from that or any other
charge. I feel that in writing
of it I have overlaid it with words rather than put it clearly to your
thought. But, such as it is, I
have described it as carefully as I now am able to do."
Here
is another document, even more definite in character, which, the writer
being a Swiss, I translate from the French original.[28]
[28]
I borrow it, with Professor Flournoy's permission, from his rich collection
of psychological documents.
"I
was in perfect health: we were
on our sixth day of tramping, and in good training.
We had come the day before from Sixt to Trient by Buet.
I felt neither fatigue, hunger, nor thirst, and my state of mind was
equally healthy. I had had at
Forlaz good news from home; I was subject to no anxiety, either near or
remote, for we had a good guide, and there was not a shadow of uncertainty
about the road we should follow. I
can best describe the condition in which I was by calling it a state of
equilibrium. When all at once I
experienced a feeling of being raised above myself, I felt the presence of
God--I tell of the thing just as I was conscious of it--as if his goodness
and his power were penetrating me altogether.
The throb of emotion was so violent that I could barely tell the boys
to pass on and not wait for me. I
then sat down on a stone, unable to stand any longer, and my eyes overflowed
with tears. I thanked God that
in the course of my life he had taught me to know him, that he sustained my
life and took pity both on the insignificant creature and on the sinner that
I was. I begged him ardently
that my life might be consecrated to the doing of his will.
I felt his reply, which was that I should do his will from day to day
in humility and poverty, leaving him, the Almighty God, to be judge of
whether I should some time be called to bear witness more conspicuously.
Then, slowly, the ecstasy left my heart; that is, I felt that God had
withdrawn the communion which he had granted, and I was able to walk on, but
very slowly, so strongly was I still possessed by the interior emotion.
Besides, I had wept uninterruptedly for several minutes, my eyes were
swollen, and I did not wish my companions to see me.
The state of ecstasy may have lasted four or five minutes, although
it seemed at the time to last much longer.
My comrades waited for me ten minutes at the cross of Barine, but I
took about twenty-five or thirty minutes to join them, for as well as I can
remember, they said that I had kept them back for about half an hour.
The impression had been so profound that in climbing slowly the slope
I asked myself if it were possible that Moses on Sinai could have had a more
intimate communication with God. I
think it well to add that in this ecstasy of mine God had neither form,
color, odor, nor taste; moreover, that the feeling of his presence was
accompanied with no determinate localization. It was rather as if my
personality had been transformed by the presence of a SPIRITUAL SPIRIT.
But the more I seek words to express this intimate intercourse, the
more I feel the impossibility of describing the thing by any of our usual
images. At bottom the
expression most apt to render what I felt is this:
God was present, though invisible; he fell under no one of my senses,
yet my consciousness perceived him."
The
adjective "mystical" is technically applied, most often. to states
that are of brief duration. Of
course such hours of rapture as the last two persons describe are mystical
experiences, of which in a later lecture I shall have much to say.
Meanwhile here is the abridged record of another mystical or
semi-mystical experience, in a mind evidently framed by nature for ardent
piety. I owe it to Starbuck's
collection. The lady who gives
the account is the daughter of a man well known in his time as a writer
against Christianity. The
suddenness of her conversion shows well how native the sense of God's
presence must be to certain minds. She
relates that she was brought up in entire ignorance of Christian doctrine,
but, when in Germany, after being talked to by Christian friends, she read
the Bible and prayed, and finally the plan of salvation flashed upon her
like a stream of light.
<69>
"To this day," she writes, "I cannot understand dallying with
religion and the commands of God. The
very instant I heard my Father's cry calling unto me, my heart bounded in
recognition.
I
ran, I stretched forth my arms, I cried aloud, 'Here, here I am, my Father.'
Oh, happy child, what should I do? 'Love
me,' answered my God. 'I do, I
do,' I cried passionately. 'Come unto me,' called my Father. 'I will,' my heart panted.
Did I stop to ask a single question?
Not one. It never
occurred to me to ask whether I was good enough, or to hesitate over my
unfitness, or to find out what I thought of his church, or . . . to wait
until I should be satisfied. Satisfied!
I was satisfied. Had I not
found my God and my Father? Did
he not love me? Had he not
called me? Was there not a
Church into which I might enter? .
. . Since then I have had direct answers to prayer--so significant as to be
almost like talking with God and hearing his answer.
The idea of God's reality has never left me for one moment."
Here
is still another case, the writer being a man aged twenty-seven, in which
the experience, probably almost as characteristic, is less vividly
described:--
"I
have on a number of occasions felt that I had enjoyed a period of intimate
communion with the divine. These
meetings came unasked and unexpected, and seemed to consist merely in the
temporary obliteration of the conventionalities which usually surround and
cover my life. . . . Once it
was when from the summit of a high mountain I looked over a gashed and
corrugated landscape extending to a long convex of ocean that ascended to
the horizon, and again from the same point when I could see nothing beneath
me but a boundless expanse of white cloud, on the blown surface of which a
few high peaks, including the one I was on, seemed plunging about as if they
were dragging their anchors.
What
I felt on these occasions was a temporary loss of my own identity,
accompanied by an illumination which revealed to me a deeper significance
than I had been wont to attach to life.
It is in this that I find my justification for saying that I have
enjoyed communication with God. Of
course the absence of such a being as this would be chaos. I cannot conceive
of life without its presence."
Of
the more habitual and so to speak chronic sense of God's presence the
following sample from Professor Starbuck's manuscript collection may serve
to give an idea. It is from a
man aged forty-nine--probably thousands of unpretending Christians would
write an almost identical account.
"God
is more real to me than any thought or thing or person.
I feel his presence positively, and the more as I live in closer
harmony with his laws as written in my body and mind.
I feel him in the sunshine or rain; and awe mingled with a delicious
restfulness most nearly describes my feelings.
I talk to him as to a companion in prayer and praise, and our
communion is delightful. He
answers me again and again, often in words so clearly spoken that it seems
my outer ear must have carried the tone, but generally in strong mental
impressions. Usually a text of
Scripture, unfolding some new view of him and his love for me, and care for
my safety. I could give
hundreds of instances, in school matters, social problems, financial
difficulties, etc. That he is
mine and I am his never leaves me, it is an abiding joy.
Without it life would be a blank, a desert, a shoreless, trackless
waste."
I
subjoin some more examples from writers of different ages and sexes.
They are also from Professor Starbuck's collection, and their number
might be greatly multiplied. The
first is from a man twenty-seven years old:--
"God
is quite real to me. I talk to
him and often get answers. Thoughts sudden and distinct from any I have been
entertaining come to my mind after asking God for his direction.
Something over a year ago I was for some weeks in the direst
perplexity. When the trouble first appeared before me I was dazed, but
before long (two or three hours) I could hear distinctly a passage of
Scripture: 'My grace is
sufficient for thee.' Every
time my thoughts turned to the trouble I could hear this quotation. I don't think I ever doubted the existence of God, or had him
drop out of my consciousness. God
has frequently stepped into my affairs very perceptibly, and I feel that he
directs many little details all the time.
But on two or three occasions he has ordered ways for me very
contrary to my ambitions and plans."
Another
statement (none the less valuable psychologically for being so decidedly
childish) is that of a boy of seventeen:--
"Sometimes
as I go to church, I sit down, join in the service, and before I go out I
feel as if God was with me, right side of me, singing and reading the Psalms
with me. . . . And then again I feel as if I could sit beside him, and put
my arms around him, kiss him, etc. When
I am taking Holy Communion at the altar, I try to get with him and generally
feel his presence."
I
let a few other cases follow at random:--
"God
surrounds me like the physical atmosphere.
He is closer to me than my own breath.
In him literally I live and move and have my being."--
"There
are times when I seem to stand in his very presence, to talk with him.
Answers to prayer have come, sometimes direct and overwhelming in
their revelation of his presence and powers.
There are times when God seems far off, but this is always my own
fault."--
"I
have the sense of a presence, strong, and at the same time soothing, which
hovers over me. Sometimes it
seems to enwrap me with sustaining arms."
Such
is the human ontological imagination, and such is the convincingness of what
it brings to birth. Unpicturable
beings are realized, and realized with an intensity almost like that of an
hallucination. They determine
our vital attitude as decisively as the vital attitude of lovers is
determined by the habitual sense, by which each is haunted, of the other
being in the world. A lover has
notoriously this sense of the continuous being of his idol, even when his
attention is addressed to other matters and he no longer represents her
features. He cannot forget her; she uninterruptedly affects him through
and through. I spoke of the
convincingness of these feelings of reality, and I must dwell a moment
longer on that point. They are
as convincing to those who have them as any direct sensible experiences can
be, and they are, as a rule, much more convincing than results established
by mere logic ever are. One may
indeed be entirely without them; probably more than one of you here present
is without them in any marked degree; but if you do have them, and have them
at all strongly, the probability is that you cannot help regarding them as
genuine perceptions of truth, as revelations of a kind of reality which no
adverse argument, however unanswerable by you in words, can expel from your
belief.
The
opinion opposed to mysticism in philosophy is sometimes spoken of as
RATIONALISM. Rationalism
insists that all our beliefs ought ultimately to find for themselves
articulate grounds. Such
grounds, for rationalism, must consist of four things:
(1) definitely statable abstract principles; (2) definite facts of
sensation; (3) definite hypotheses based on such facts; and (4) definite
inferences logically drawn. Vague
impressions of something indefinable have no place in the rationalistic
system, which on its positive side is surely a splendid intellectual
tendency, for not only are all our philosophies fruits of it, but physical
science (amongst other good things) is its result.
Nevertheless,
if we look on man's whole mental life as it exists, on the life of men that
lies in them apart from their learning and science, and that they inwardly
and privately follow, we have to confess that the part of it of which
rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial.
It is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has the
loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down
with words. But it will fail to
convince or convert you all the same, if your dumb intuitions are opposed to
its conclusions. If you have
intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the
loquacious level which rationalism inhabits.
Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs,
your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness
now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely KNOWS
that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk,
however clever, that may contradict it.
This inferiority of the rationalistic level in founding belief is
just as manifest when rationalism argues for religion as when it argues
against it. That vast literature of proofs of God's existence drawn from
the order of nature, which a century ago seemed so overwhelmingly
convincing, to-day does little more than gather dust in libraries, for the
simple reason that our generation has ceased to believe in the kind of God
it argued for. Whatever sort of
a being God may be, we KNOW to-day that he is nevermore that mere external
inventor of "contrivances" intended to make manifest his
"glory" in which our great-grandfathers took such satisfaction,
though just how we know this we cannot possibly make clear by words either
to others or to ourselves. I
defy any of you here fully to account for your persuasion that if a God
exist he must be a more cosmic and tragic personage than that Being.
The
truth is that in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons
are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have
already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion.
Then, indeed, our intuitions and our reason work together, and great
world-ruling systems, like that of the Buddhist or of the Catholic
philosophy, may grow up. Our impulsive belief is here always what sets up
the original body of truth, and our articulately verbalized philosophy is
but its showy translation into formulas.
The unreasoned and immediate assurance is the deep thing in us, the
reasoned argument is but a surface exhibition.
Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow. If a person feels the presence of a living God after the
fashion shown by my quotations, your critical arguments, be they never so
superior, will vainly set themselves to change his faith.
Please
observe, however, that I do not yet say that it is BETTER that the
subconscious and non-rational should thus hold primacy in the religious
realm. I confine myself to
simply pointing out that they do so hold it as a matter of fact.
So
much for our sense of the reality of the religious objects. Let me now say a
brief word more about the attitudes they characteristically awaken.
We
have already agreed that they are SOLEMN; and we have seen reason to think
that the most distinctive of them is the sort of joy which may result in
extreme cases from absolute self-surrender.
The sense of the kind of object to which the surrender is made has
much to do with determining the precise complexion of the joy; and the whole
phenomenon is more complex than any simple formula allows.
In the literature of the subject, sadness and gladness have each been
emphasized in turn. The ancient
saying that the first maker of the Gods was fear receives voluminous
corroboration from every age of religious history; but none the less does
religious history show the part which joy has evermore tended to play. Sometimes the joy has been primary; sometimes secondary,
being the gladness of deliverance from the fear. This latter state of
things, being the more complex, is also the more complete; and as we
proceed, I think we shall have abundant reason for refusing to leave out
either the sadness or the gladness, if we look at religion with the breadth
of view which it demands. Stated
in the completest possible terms, a man's religion involves both moods of
contraction and moods of expansion of his being.
But the quantitative mixture and order of these moods vary so much
from one age of the world, from one system of thought, and from one
individual to another, that you may insist either on the dread and the
submission, or on the peace and the freedom as the essence of the matter,
and still remain materially within the limits of the truth.
The constitutionally sombre and the constitutionally sanguine
onlooker are bound to emphasize opposite aspects of what lies before their
eyes.
The
constitutionally sombre religious person makes even of his religious peace a
very sober thing. Danger still
hovers in the air about it. Flexion
and contraction are not wholly checked.
It were sparrowlike and childish after our deliverance to explode
into twittering laughter and caper-cutting, and utterly to forget the
imminent hawk on bough. Lie
low, rather, lie low; for you are in the hands of a living God.
In the Book of Job, for example, the impotence of man and the
omnipotence of God is the exclusive burden of its author's mind.
"It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do?--deeper than hell;
what canst thou know?"
There is an astringent relish about the truth of this conviction
which some men can feel, and which for them is as near an approach as can be
made to the feeling of religious joy.
"In
Job," says that coldly truthful writer, the author of Mark Rutherford,
"God reminds us that man is not the measure of his creation.
The world is immense, constructed on no plan or theory which the
intellect of man can grasp. It is TRANSCENDENT everywhere.
This is the burden of every verse, and is the secret if there be one,
of the poem. Sufficient or
insufficient, there is nothing more. . . .
God is great, we know not his ways.
He takes from us all we have, but yet if we possess our souls in
patience, we MAY pass the valley of the shadow, and come out in sunlight
again. We may or we may not! .
. . What more have we to say now than God said from the whirlwind over two
thousand five hundred years ago?"[29]
[29]
Mark Rutherford's Deliverance, London, 1885, pp. 196, 198.
If
we turn to the sanguine onlooker, on the other hand, we find that
deliverance is felt as incomplete unless the burden be altogether overcome
and the danger forgotten. Such
onlookers give us definitions that seem to the sombre minds of whom we have
just been speaking to leave out all the solemnity that makes religious peace
so different from merely animal joys. In
the opinion of some writers an attitude might be called religious, though no
touch were left in it of sacrifice or submission, no tendency to flexion, no
bowing of the head. Any
"habitual and regulated admiration," says Professor J. R.
Seeley,[30] "is worthy to be called a religion"; and accordingly
he thinks that our Music, our Science, and our so-called
"Civilization," as these things are now organized and admiringly
believed in, form the more genuine religions of our time.
Certainly the unhesitating and unreasoning way in which we feel that
we must inflict our civilization upon "lower" races, by means of
Hotchkiss guns, etc., reminds one of nothing so much as of the early spirit
of Islam spreading its religion by the sword.
[30]
In his book (too little read, I fear), Natural Religion, 3d edition, Boston,
1886, pp. 91, 122.
In
my last lecture I quoted to you the ultra-radical opinion of Mr. Havelock
Ellis, that laughter of any sort may be considered a religious exercise, for
it bears witness to the soul's emancipation.
I quoted this opinion in order to deny its adequacy. But we must now settle our scores more carefully with this
whole optimistic way of thinking. It
is far too complex to be decided off-hand.
I propose accordingly that we make of religious optimism the theme of
the next two lectures.
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