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In
the hour immediately before us, I shall invite you to consider the simpler
kinds of religious happiness, leaving the more complex sorts to be treated
on a later day.
In
many persons, happiness is congenital and irreclaimable. "Cosmic
emotion" inevitably takes in them the form of enthusiasm and freedom.
I speak not only of those who are animally happy.
I mean those who, when unhappiness is offered or proposed to them,
positively refuse to feel it, as if it were something mean and wrong.
We find such persons in every age, passionately flinging themselves
upon their sense of the goodness of life, in spite of the hardships of their
own condition, and in spite of the sinister theologies into which they may
he born. From the outset their
religion is one of union with the divine.
The heretics who went before the reformation are lavishly accused by
the church writers of antinomian practices, just as the first Christians
were accused of indulgence in orgies by the Romans.
It is probable that there never has been a century in which the
deliberate refusal to think ill of life has not been idealized by a
sufficient number of persons to form sects, open or secret, who claimed all
natural things to be permitted. Saint
Augustine's maxim, Dilige et quod vis fac--if you but love [God], you may do
as you incline--is morally one of the profoundest of observations, yet it is
pregnant, for such persons, with passports beyond the bounds of conventional
morality. According to their
characters they have been refined or gross; but their belief has been at all
times systematic enough to constitute a definite religious attitude.
God was for them a giver of freedom, and the sting of evil was
overcome. Saint Francis and his
immediate disciples were, on the whole, of this company of spirits, of which
there are of course infinite varieties.
Rousseau in the earlier years of his writing, Diderot, B. de Saint
Pierre, and many of the leaders of the eighteenth century anti-Christian
movement were of this optimistic type. They owed their influence to a
certain authoritativeness in their feeling that Nature, if you will only
trust her sufficiently, is absolutely good.
It
is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhaps more often feminine
than masculine, and young than old, whose soul is of this sky-blue tint,
whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all enchanting
innocencies than with dark human passions, who can think no ill of man or
God, and in whom religious gladness, being in possession from the outset,
needs no deliverance from any antecedent burden.
"God
has two families of children on this earth," says Francis W.
Newman,[32] "the once-born and the twice-born," and the once-born
he describes as follows: "They
see God, not as a strict Judge, not as a Glorious Potentate; but as the
animating Spirit of a beautiful harmonious world, Beneficent and Kind,
Merciful as well as Pure. The
same characters generally have no metaphysical tendencies:
they do not look back into themselves. Hence they are not distressed
by their own imperfections: yet
it would be absurd to call them self-righteous; for they hardly think of
themselves AT ALL. This
childlike quality of their nature makes the opening of religion very happy
to them: for they no more
shrink from God, than a child from an emperor, before whom the parent
trembles: in fact, they have no
vivid conception of ANY of the qualities in which the severer Majesty of God
consists.[33] He is to them the impersonation of Kindness and Beauty.
They read his character, not in the disordered world of man, but in
romantic and harmonious nature. Of human sin they know perhaps little in
their own hearts and not very much in the world; and human suffering does
but melt them to tenderness. Thus,
when they approach God, no inward disturbance ensues; and without being as
yet spiritual, they have a certain complacency and perhaps romantic sense of
excitement in their simple worship."
[32]
The Soul; its Sorrows and its Aspirations, 3d edition, 1852, pp. 89, 91.
[33]
I once heard a lady describe the pleasure it gave her to think that she
"could always cuddle up to God."
In
the Romish Church such characters find a more congenial soil to grow in than
in Protestantism, whose fashions of feeling have been set by minds of a
decidedly pessimistic order. But
even in Protestantism they have been abundant enough; and in its recent
"liberal" developments of Unitarianism and latitudinarianism
generally, minds of this order have played and still are playing leading and
constructive parts. Emerson
himself is an admirable example. Theodore
Parker is another--here are a couple of characteristic passages from
Parker's correspondence.[34]
[34]
John Weiss: Life of Theodore
Parker, i. 152, 32.
"Orthodox
scholars say: 'In the heathen
classics you find no consciousness of sin.' It is very true--God be thanked
for it. They were conscious of wrath, of cruelty, avarice, drunkenness,
lust, sloth, cowardice, and other actual vices, and struggled and got rid of
the deformities, but they were not conscious of 'enmity against God,' and
didn't sit down and whine and groan against non-existent evil.
I have done wrong things enough in my life, and do them now; I miss
the mark, draw bow, and try again. But
I am not conscious of hating God, or man, or right, or love, and I know
there is much 'health in me', and in my body, even now, there dwelleth many
a good thing, spite of consumption and Saint Paul."
In another letter Parker writes:
"I have swum in clear sweet waters all my days; and if sometimes
they were a little cold, and the stream ran adverse and something rough, it
was never too strong to be breasted and swum through.
From the days of earliest boyhood, when I went stumbling through the
grass, . . . up to the gray-bearded manhood of this time, there is none but
has left me honey in the hive of memory that I now feed on for present
delight. When I recall the years . . . I am filled with a sense of sweetness
and wonder that such little things can make a mortal so exceedingly rich.
But I must confess that the chiefest of all my delights is still the
religious."
Another
good expression of the "once-born" type of consciousness,
developing straight and natural, with no element of morbid compunction or
crisis, is contained in the answer of Dr. Edward Everett Hale, the eminent
Unitarian preacher and writer, to one of Dr. Starbuck's circulars.
I quote a part of it:--
"I
observe, with profound regret, the religious struggles which come into many
biographies, as if almost essential to the formation of the hero.
I ought to speak of these, to say that any man has an advantage, not
to be estimated, who is born, as I was, into a family where the religion is
simple and rational; who is trained in the theory of such a religion, so
that he never knows, for an hour, what these religious or irreligious
struggles are. I always knew
God loved me, and I was always grateful to him for the world he placed me
in. I always liked to tell him
so, and was always glad to receive his suggestions to me. . . . I can
remember perfectly that when I was coming to manhood, the half-philosophical
novels of the time had a deal to say about the young men and maidens who
were facing the 'problem of life.' I had no idea whatever what the problem
of life was. To live with all
my might seemed to me easy; to learn where there was so much to learn seemed
pleasant and almost of course; to lend a hand, if one had a chance, natural;
and if one did this, why, he enjoyed life because he could not help it, and
without proving to himself that he ought to enjoy it. . . . A child who is
early taught that he is God's child, that he may live and move and have his
being in God, and that he has, therefore, infinite strength at hand for the
conquering of any difficulty, will take life more easily, and probably will
make more of it, than one who is told that he is born the child of wrath and
wholly incapable of good."[35]
[35]
Starbuck: Psychology of
Religion, pp. 305, 306.
One
can but recognize in such writers as these the presence of a temperament
organically weighted on the side of cheer and fatally forbidden to linger,
as those of opposite temperament linger, over the darker aspects of the
universe. In some individuals optimism may become quasi-pathological. The
capacity for even a transient sadness or a momentary humility seems cut off
from them as by a kind of congenital anaesthesia.[36]
[36]
"I know not to what physical laws philosophers will some day refer the
feelings of melancholy. For
myself, I find that they are the most voluptuous of all sensations,"
writes Saint Pierre, and accordingly he devotes a series of sections of his
work on Nature to the Plaisirs de la Ruine, Plaisirs des Tombeaux, Ruines de
la Nature, Plaisirs de la Solitude--each of them more optimistic than the
last.
This
finding of a luxury in woe is very common during adolescence. The
truth-telling Marie Bashkirtseff expresses it well:--
"In
his 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." [37]
[37]
Journal de Marie Bashkirtseff, i. 67.
The
supreme contemporary example of such an inability to feel evil is of course
Walt Whitman.
"His
favorite occupation," writes his disciple, Dr. Bucke "seemed to be
strolling or sauntering about outdoors by himself, looking at the grass, the
trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the varying aspects of the sky, and
listening to the birds, the crickets, the tree frogs, and all the hundreds
of natural sounds.
It
was evident that these things gave him a pleasure far beyond what they give
to ordinary people. Until I
knew the man," continues Dr. Bucke, "it had not occurred to me
that any one could derive so much absolute happiness from these things as he
did. He was very fond of
flowers, either wild or cultivated; liked all sorts.
I think he admired lilacs and sunflowers just as much as roses. Perhaps, indeed, no man who ever lived liked so many things
and disliked so few as Walt Whitman. All
natural objects seemed to have a charm for him. All sights and sounds seemed to please him.
He appeared to like (and I believe he did like) all the men, women,
and children he saw (though I never knew him to say that he liked any one),
but each who knew him felt that he liked him or her, and that he liked
others also. I never knew him
to argue or dispute, and he never spoke about money.
He always justified, sometimes playfully, sometimes quite seriously,
those who spoke harshly of himself or his writings, and I often thought he
even took pleasure in the opposition of enemies.
When I first knew [him], I used to think that he watched himself, and
would not allow his tongue to give expression to fretfulness, antipathy,
complaint, and remonstrance. It did not occur to me as possible that these mental states
could be absent in him. After
long observation, however, I satisfied myself that such absence or
unconsciousness was entirely real. He
never spoke deprecatingly of any nationality or class of men, or time in the
world's history, or against any trades or occupations--not even against any
animals, insects, or inanimate things, nor any of the laws of nature, nor
any of the results of those laws, such as illness, deformity, and death.
He never complained or grumbled either at the weather, pain, illness,
or anything else. He never
swore. He could not very well,
since he never spoke in anger and apparently never was angry.
He never exhibited fear, and I do not believe he ever felt
it."[38]
[38]
R. M. Bucke: Cosmic
consciousness, pp. 182-186, abridged.
Walt
Whitman owes his importance in literature to the systematic expulsion from
his writings of all contractile elements.
The only sentiments he allowed himself to express were of the
expansive order; and he expressed these in the first person, not as your
mere monstrously conceited individual might so express them, but vicariously
for all men, so that a passionate and mystic ontological emotion suffuses
his words, and ends by persuading the reader that men and women, life and
death, and all things are divinely good.
Thus
it has come about that many persons to-day regard Walt Whitman as the
restorer of the eternal natural religion. He has infected them with his own
love of comrades, with his own gladness that he and they exist.
Societies are actually formed for his cult; a periodical organ exists
for its propagation, in which the lines of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are
already beginning to be drawn;[39] hymns are written by others in his
peculiar prosody; and he is even explicitly compared with the founder of the
Christian religion, not altogether to the advantage of the latter.
[39]
I refer to The Conservator, edited by Horace Traubel, and published monthly
at Philadelphia.
Whitman
is often spoken of as a "pagan."
The word nowadays means sometimes the mere natural animal man without
a sense of sin; sometimes it means a Greek or Roman with his own peculiar
religious consciousness. In
neither of these senses does it fitly define this poet.
He is more than your mere animal man who has not tasted of the tree
of good and evil. He is aware
enough of sin for a swagger to be present in his indifference towards it, a
conscious pride in his freedom from flexions and contractions, which your
genuine pagan in the first sense of the word would never show.
"I
could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contained,
I
stand and look at them long and long;
They
do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They
do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
Not
one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not
one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands
of years ago,
Not
one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth."[40]
[40]
Song of Myself, 32.
No
natural pagan could have written these well-known lines.
But on the other hand Whitman is less than a Greek or Roman; for
their consciousness, even in Homeric times, was full to the brim of the sad
mortality of this sunlit world, and such a consciousness Walt Whitman
resolutely refuses to adopt. When,
for example, Achilles, about to slay Lycaon, Priam's young son, hears him
sue for mercy, he stops to say:--
"Ah,
friend, thou too must die: why
thus lamentest thou? Patroclos too is dead, who was better far than thou. .
. . Over me too hang death and forceful fate.
There cometh morn or eve or some noonday when my life too some man
shall take in battle, whether with spear he smite, or arrow from the
string."[41]
[41]
Iliad, XXI., E. Myers's translation.
Then
Achilles savagely severs the poor boy's neck with his sword, heaves him by
the foot into the Scamander, and calls to the fishes of the river to eat the
white fat of Lycaon. Just as
here the cruelty and the sympathy each ring true, and do not mix or
interfere with one another, so did the Greeks and Romans keep all their
sadnesses and gladnesses unmingled and entire.
Instinctive good they did not reckon sin; nor had they any such
desire to save the credit of the universe as to make them insist, as so many
of US insist, that what immediately appears as evil must be "good in
the making," or something equally ingenious.
Good was good, and bad just bad, for the earlier Greeks.
They neither denied the ills of nature--Walt Whitman's verse,
"What is called good is perfect and what is called bad is just as
perfect," would have been mere silliness to them--nor did they, in
order to escape from those ills, invent "another and a better
world" of the imagination, in which, along with the ills, the innocent
goods of sense would also find no place. This integrity of the instinctive reactions, this freedom
from all moral sophistry and strain, gives a pathetic dignity to ancient
pagan feeling. And this quality Whitman's outpourings have not got. His
optimism is too voluntary and defiant; his gospel has a touch of bravado and
an affected twist,[42] and this diminishes its effect on many readers who
yet are well disposed towards optimism, and on the whole quite willing to
admit that in important respects Whitman is of the genuine lineage of the
prophets.
[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.
If,
then, we give the name of healthy-mindedness to the tendency which looks on
all things and sees that they are good, we find that we must distinguish
between a more involuntary and a more voluntary or systematic way of being
healthy-minded. In its
involuntary variety, healthy-mindedness is a way of feeling happy about
things immediately. In its
systematical variety, it is an abstract way of conceiving things as good.
Every abstract way of conceiving things selects some one aspect of
them as their essence for the time being, and disregards the other aspects.
Systematic healthy-mindedness, conceiving good as the essential and
universal aspect of being, deliberately excludes evil from its field of
vision; and although, when thus nakedly stated, this might seem a difficult
feat to perform for one who is intellectually sincere with himself and
honest about facts, a little reflection shows that the situation is too
complex to lie open to so simple a criticism.
In
the first place, happiness, like every other emotional state, has blindness
and insensibility to opposing facts given it as its instinctive weapon for
self-protection against disturbance. When happiness is actually in
possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality
than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply
cannot then and there be believed in. He
must ignore it; and to the bystander he may then seem perversely to shut his
eyes to it and hush it up.
But
more than this: the hushing of
it up may, in a perfectly candid and honest mind, grow into a deliberate
religious policy, or parti pris. Much
of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon.
It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a
simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of
fight; its sting so often departs and turns into a relish when, after vainly
seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and bear it cheerfully, that a
man is simply bound in honor, with reference to many of the facts that seem
at first to disconcert his peace, to adopt this way of escape.
Refuse to admit their badness; despise their power; ignore their
presence; turn your attention the other way; and so far as you yourself are
concerned at any rate, though the facts may still exist, their evil
character exists no longer. Since
you make them evil or good by your own thoughts about them, it is the ruling
of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern.
The
deliberate adoption of an optimistic turn of mind thus makes its entrance
into philosophy. And once in,
it is hard to trace its lawful bounds.
Not only does the human instinct for happiness, bent on
self-protection by ignoring, keep working in its favor, but higher inner
ideals have weighty words to say. The
attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly.
What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping
mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is
more injurious to others? What
less helpful as a way out of the difficulty?
It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and
increases the total evil of the situation.
At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we
ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance.
But it is impossible to carry on this discipline in the subjective
sphere without zealously emphasizing the brighter and minimizing the darker
aspects of the objective sphere of things at the same time.
And thus our resolution not to indulge in misery, beginning at a
comparatively small point within ourselves, may not stop until it has
brought the entire frame of reality under a systematic conception optimistic
enough to be congenial with its needs.
In
all this I say nothing of any mystical insight or persuasion that the total
frame of things absolutely must be good.
Such mystical persuasion plays an enormous part in the history of the
religious consciousness, and we must look at it later with some care.
But we need not go so far at present. More ordinary non-mystical
conditions of rapture suffice for my immediate contention.
All invasive moral states and passionate enthusiasms make one
feelingless to evil in some direction. The common penalties cease to deter
the patriot, the usual prudences are flung by the lover to the winds.
When the passion is extreme, suffering may actually be gloried in,
provided it be for the ideal cause, death may lose its sting, the grave its
victory. In these states, the
ordinary contrast of good and ill seems to be swallowed up in a higher
denomination, an omnipotent excitement which engulfs the evil, and which the
human being welcomes as the crowning experience of his life.
This, he says, is truly to live, and I exult in the heroic
opportunity and adventure.
The
systematic cultivation of healthy-mindedness as a religious attitude is
therefore consonant with important currents in human nature, and is anything
but absurd. In fact. we all do
cultivate it more or less, even when our professed theology should in
consistency forbid it. We
divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; and the
slaughter-houses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded
are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize
officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer
and cleaner and better than the world that really is.[43]
[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
maenadic--foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me. R. L. Stevenson: Letters,
ii. 355.
The
advance of liberalism, so-called, in Christianity, during the past fifty
years, may fairly be called a victory of healthy-mindedness within the
church over the morbidness with which the old hell-fire theology was more
harmoniously related. We have
now whole congregations whose preachers, far from magnifying our
consciousness of sin, seem devoted rather to making little of it.
They ignore, or even deny, eternal punishment, and insist on the
dignity rather than on the depravity of man.
They look at the continual preoccupation of the old-fashioned
Christian with the salvation of his soul as something sickly and
reprehensible rather than admirable; and a sanguine and "muscular"
attitude. which to our forefathers would have seemed purely heathen, has
become in their eyes an ideal element of Christian character. I am not
asking whether or not they are right, I am only pointing out the change.
The persons to whom I refer have still retained for the most part
their nominal connection with Christianity, in spite of their discarding of
its more pessimistic theological elements.
But in that "theory of evolution" which, gathering momentum
for a century, has within the past twenty-five years swept so rapidly over
Europe and America, we see the ground laid for a new sort of religion of
Nature, which has entirely displaced Christianity from the thought of a
large part of our generation. The
idea of a universal evolution lends itself to a doctrine of general
meliorism and progress which fits the religious needs of the healthy-minded
so well that it seems almost as if it might have been created for their use.
Accordingly we find "evolutionism" interpreted thus
optimistically and embraced as a substitute for the religion they were born
in, by a multitude of our contemporaries who have either been trained
scientifically, or been fond of reading popular science, and who had already
begun to be inwardly dissatisfied with what seemed to them the harshness and
irrationality of the orthodox Christian scheme. As examples are better than descriptions, I will quote a
document received in answer to Professor Starbuck's circular of questions.
The
writer's state of mind may by courtesy be called a religion, for it is his
reaction on the whole nature of things, it is systematic and reflective and
it loyally binds him to certain inner ideals.
I think you will recognize in him, coarse-meated and incapable of
wounded spirit as he is, a sufficiently familiar contemporary type.
Q.
What does Religion mean to you?
A.
It means nothing; and it seems, so far as I can observe useless to
others. I am sixty-seven years
of age and have resided in X fifty years, and have been in business
forty-five, consequently I have some little experience of life and men, and
some women too, and I find that the most religious and pious people are as a
rule those most lacking in uprightness and morality.
The
men who do not go to church or have any religious convictions are the best.
Praying, singing of hymns, and sermonizing are pernicious--they teach
us to rely on some supernatural power, when we ought to rely on ourselves.
I TEEtotally disbelieve in a God.
The God-idea was begotten in ignorance, fear, and a general lack of
any knowledge of Nature. If I
were to die now, being in a healthy condition for my age, both mentally and
physically, I would just as lief, yes, rather, die with a hearty enjoyment
of music, sport, or any other rational pastime. As a timepiece stops, we
die--there being no immortality in either case.
Q.
What comes before your mind corresponding to the words God, Heaven,
Angels, etc?
A.
Nothing whatever. I am a man without a religion.
These words mean so much mythic bosh.
Q.
Have you had any experiences which appeared providential?
A.
None whatever. There is no agency of the superintending kind.
A little judicious observation as well as knowledge of scientific law
will convince any one of this fact.
Q.
What things work most strongly on your emotions?
A.
Lively songs and music; Pinafore instead of an Oratorio. I like
Scott, Burns, Byron, Longfellow, especially Shakespeare, etc., etc.
Of songs, the Star-Spangled Banner, America, Marseillaise, and all
moral and soul-stirring songs, but wishy-washy hymns are my detestation.
I greatly enjoy nature, especially fine weather, and until within a
few years used to walk Sundays into the country, twelve miles often, with no
fatigue, and bicycle forty or fifty. I
have dropped the bicycle.
I
never go to church, but attend lectures when there are any good ones.
All of my thoughts and cogitations have been of a healthy and
cheerful kind, for instead of doubts and fears I see things as they are, for
I endeavor to adjust myself to my environment.
This I regard as the deepest law.
Mankind is a progressive animal.
I am satisfied he will have made a great advance over his present
status a thousand years hence.
Q.
What is your notion of sin?
A.
It seems to me that sin is a condition, a disease, incidental to
man's development not being yet advanced enough.
Morbidness over it
increases the disease. We
should think that a million of years hence equity, justice, and mental and
physical good order will be so fixed and organized that no one will have any
idea of evil or sin.
Q.
What is your temperament?
A.
Nervous, active, wide-awake, mentally and physically. Sorry that
Nature compels us to sleep at all.
If
we are in search of a broken and a contrite heart, clearly we need not look
to this brother. His
contentment with the finite incases him like a lobster-shell and shields him
from all morbid repining at his distance from the infinite.
We have in him an excellent example of the optimism which may be
encouraged by popular science.
To
my mind a current far more important and interesting religiously than that
which sets in from natural science towards healthy-mindedness is that which
has recently poured over America and seems to be gathering force every
day--I am ignorant what foothold it may yet have acquired in Great
Britain--and to which, for the sake of having a brief designation, I will
give the title of the "Mind-cure movement."
There are various sects of this "New Thought," to use
another of the names by which it calls itself; but their agreements are so
profound that their differences may be neglected for my present purpose, and
I will treat the movement, without apology, as if it were a simple thing.
It
is a deliberately optimistic scheme of life, with both a speculative and a
practical side. In its gradual
development during the last quarter of a century, it has taken up into
itself a number of contributory elements, and it must now be reckoned with
as a genuine religious power. It
has reached the stage, for example, when the demand for its literature is
great enough for insincere stuff, mechanically produced for the market, to
be to a certain extent supplied by publishers--a phenomenon never observed,
I imagine, until a religion has got well past its earliest insecure
beginnings.
One
of the doctrinal sources of Mind-cure is the four Gospels; another is
Emersonianism or New England transcendentalism; another is Berkeleyan
idealism; another is spiritism, with its messages of "law" and
"progress" and "development"; another the optimistic
popular science evolutionism of which I have recently spoken; and, finally,
Hinduism has contributed a strain. But
the most characteristic feature of the mind-cure movement is an inspiration
much more direct. The leaders
in this faith have had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of
healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage,
hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all
nervously precautionary states of mind.[44] Their belief has in a general
way been corroborated by the practical experience of their disciples; and
this experience forms to-day a mass imposing in amount.
[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.
The
blind have been made to see, the halt to walk; life-long invalids have had
their health restored. The
moral fruits have been no less remarkable.
The deliberate adoption of a healthy-minded attitude has proved
possible to many who never supposed they had it in them; regeneration of
character has gone on on an extensive scale; and cheerfulness has been
restored to countless homes. The
indirect influence of this has been great.
The mind-cure principles are beginning so to pervade the air that one
catches their spirit at second-hand. One
hears of the "Gospel of Relaxation," of the "Don't Worry
Movement," of people who repeat to themselves, "Youth, health,
vigor!" when dressing in the morning, as their motto for the day.
Complaints
of the weather are getting to be forbidden in many households; and more and
more people are recognizing it to be bad form to speak of disagreeable
sensations, or to make much of the ordinary inconveniences and ailments of
life. These general tonic
effects on public opinion would be good even if the more striking results
were non-existent. But the
latter abound so that we can afford to overlook the innumerable failures and
self-deceptions that are mixed in with them (for in everything human failure
is a matter of course), and we can also overlook the verbiage of a good deal
of the mind-cure literature, some of which is so moonstruck with optimism
and so vaguely expressed that an academically trained intellect finds it
almost impossible to read it at all.
The
plain fact remains that the spread of the movement has been due to practical
fruits, and the extremely practical turn of character of the American people
has never been better shown than by the fact that this, their only decidedly
original contribution to the systematic philosophy of life, should be so
intimately knit up with concrete therapeutics.
To the importance of mind-cure the medical and clerical professions
in the United States are beginning, though with much recalcitrancy and
protesting, to open their eyes. It
is evidently bound to develop still farther, both speculatively and
practically, and its latest writers are far and away the ablest of the
group.[45] It matters nothing that, just as there are hosts of persons who
cannot pray, so there are greater hosts who cannot by any possibility be
influenced by the mind-curers' ideas. For
our immediate purpose, the important point is that so large a number should
exist who CAN be so influenced.
They form a psychic type to be studied with respect.[46]
[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).
To
come now to a little closer quarters with their creed. The fundamental pillar on which it rests is nothing more than
the general basis of all religious experience, the fact that man has a dual
nature, and is connected with two spheres of thought, a shallower and a
profounder sphere, in either of which he may learn to live more habitually.
The shallower and lower sphere is that of the fleshly sensations,
instincts, and desires, of egotism, doubt, and the lower personal interests.
But whereas Christian theology has always considered FROWARDNESS to
be the essential vice of this part of human nature, the mind-curers say that
the mark of the beast in it is FEAR; and this is what gives such an entirely
new religious turn to their persuasion.
"Fear,"
to quote a writer of the school, "has had its uses in the evolutionary
process, and seems to constitute the whole of forethought in most animals;
but that it should remain any part of the mental equipment of human
civilized life is an absurdity. I
find that the fear clement of forethought is not stimulating to those more
civilized persons to whom duty and attraction are the natural motives, but
is weakening and deterrent. As
soon as it becomes unnecessary, fear becomes a positive deterrent, and
should be entirely removed, as dead flesh is removed from living tissue.
To assist in the analysis of fear and in the denunciation of its
expressions, I have coined the word fearthought to stand for the
unprofitable element of forethought, and have defined the word 'worry' as
fearthought in contradistinction to forethought.
I have also defined fearthought as the self-imposed or self-permitted
suggestion of inferiority, in order to place it where it really belongs, in
the category of harmful, unnecessary, and therefore not respectable
things."[47]
[47]
Horace Fletcher: Happiness as
found in Forethought Minus Fearthought, Menticulture Series, ii.
Chicago and New York, Stone. 1897, pp. 21-25, abridged.
The
"misery-habit," the "martyr-habit," engendered by the
prevalent "fearthought," get pungent criticism from the mind-cure
writers:--
"Consider
for a moment the habits of life into which we are born.
There
are certain social conventions or customs and alleged requirements, there is
a theological bias, a general view of the world.
There are conservative ideas in regard to our early training, our
education, marriage, and occupation in life. Following close upon this,
there is a long series of anticipations, namely, that we shall suffer
certain children's diseases, diseases of middle life, and of old age; the
thought that we shall grow old, lose our faculties, and again become
childlike; while crowning all is the fear of death.
Then there is a long line of particular tears and trouble-bearing
expectations, such, for example, as ideas associated with certain articles
of food, the dread of the east wind, the terrors of hot weather, the aches
and pains associated with cold weather, the fear of catching cold if one
sits in a draught, the coming of hay-fever upon the 14th of August in the
middle of the day, and so on through a long list of fears, dreads,
worriments, anxieties, anticipations, expectations, pessimisms, morbidities,
and the whole ghostly train of fateful shapes which our fellow-men, and
especially physicians, are ready to help us conjure up, an array worthy to
rank with Bradley's 'unearthly ballet of bloodless categories.'
"Yet
this is not all. This vast
array is swelled by innumerable volunteers from daily life--the fear of
accident, the possibility of calamity, the loss of property, the chance of
robbery, of fire, or the outbreak of war.
And it is not deemed sufficient to fear for ourselves.
When a friend is taken ill, we must forth with fear the worst and
apprehend death. If one meets
with sorrow . . . sympathy means to enter into and increase the
suffering."[48]
[48]
H. W. Dresser: Voices of
Freedom, New York, 1899, p. 38.
"Man,"
to quote another writer, "often has fear stamped upon him before his
entrance into the outer world; he is reared in fear; all his life is passed
in bondage to fear of disease and death, and thus his whole mentality
becomes cramped, limited, and depressed, and his body follows its shrunken
pattern and specification . . . Think of the millions of sensitive and
responsive souls among our ancestors who have been under the dominion of
such a perpetual nightmare! Is it not surprising that health exists at all?
Nothing but the boundless divine love? exuberance, and vitality,
constantly poured in, even though unconsciously to us, could in some degree
neutralize such an ocean of morbidity."[49]
[49]
Henry Wood: Ideal Suggestion
through Mental Photography. Boston, 1899, p. 54.
Although
the disciples of the mind-cure often use Christian terminology, one sees
from such quotations how widely their notion of the fall of man diverges
from that of ordinary Christians.[50]
[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.
Their
notion of man's higher nature is hardly less divergent, being decidedly
pantheistic. The spiritual in
man appears in the mind-cure
philosophy as partly conscious, but chiefly subconscious; and through the
subconscious part of it we are already one with the Divine without any
miracle of grace, or abrupt creation of a new inner man.
As this view is variously expressed by different writers, we find in
it traces of Christian mysticism, of transcendental idealism, of vedantism,
and of the modern psychology of the subliminal self.
A quotation or two will put us at the central point of view:--
"The
great central fact of the universe is that spirit of infinite life and power
that is back of all, that manifests itself in and through all.
This spirit of infinite life and power that is back of all is what I
call God. I care not what term
you may use, be it Kindly Light, Providence, the Over-Soul, Omnipotence, or
whatever term may be most convenient, so long as we are agreed in regard to
the great central fact itself. God
then fills the universe alone, so that all is from Him and in Him, and there
is nothing that is outside. He
is the life of our life our very life itself.
We are partakers of the life of God; and though we differ from Him in
that we are individualized spirits, while He is the Infinite Spirit,
including us, as well as all else beside, yet in essence the life of God and
the life of man are identically the same, and so are one.
They differ not in essence or quality; they differ in degree.
"The
great central fact in human life is the coming into a conscious vital
realization of our oneness with this Infinite Life and the opening of
ourselves fully to this divine inflow.
In just the degree that we come into a conscious realization of our
oneness with the Infinite Life, and open ourselves to this divine inflow, do
we actualize in ourselves the qualities and powers of the Infinite Life, do
we make ourselves channels through which the Infinite Intelligence and Power
can work. In just the degree in
which you realize your oneness with the Infinite Spirit, you will exchange
dis-ease for ease, inharmony for harmony, suffering and pain for abounding
health and strength. To
recognize our own divinity, and our intimate relation to the Universal, is
to attach the belts of our machinery to the powerhouse of the Universe. One need remain in hell no longer than one chooses to; we can
rise to any heaven we ourselves choose; and when we choose so to rise, all
the higher powers of the Universe combine to help us heavenward."[51]
[51]
R. W. Trine: In Tune with the
Infinite, 26th thousand, N.Y. 1899. I
have strung scattered passages together.
Let
me now pass from these abstracter statements to some more concrete accounts
of experience with the mind-cure religion.
I have many answers from correspondents--the only difficulty is to
choose. The first two whom I
shall quote are my personal friends. One
of them, a woman, writing as follows, expresses well the feeling of
continuity with the Infinite Power, by which all mind-cure disciples are
inspired.
"The
first underlying cause of all sickness, weakness, or depression is the human
sense of separateness from that Divine Energy which we call God.
The soul which can feel and affirm in serene but jubilant confidence,
as did the Nazarene: 'I and my
Father are one,' has no further need of healer, or of healing. This is the
whole truth in a nutshell, and other foundation for wholeness can no man lay
than this fact of impregnable divine union.
Disease can no longer attack one whose feet are planted on this rock,
who feels hourly, momently, the influx of the Deific Breath.
If one with Omnipotence, how can weariness enter the consciousness,
how illness assail that indomitable spark?
"This
possibility of annulling forever the law of fatigue has been abundantly
proven in my own case; for my earlier life bears a record of many, many
years of bedridden invalidism, with spine and lower limbs paralyzed.
My thoughts were no more impure than they are to-day, although my
belief in the necessity of illness was dense and unenlightened; but since my
resurrection in the flesh, I have worked as a healer unceasingly for
fourteen years without a vacation, and can truthfully assert that I have
never known a moment of fatigue or pain, although coming in touch constantly
with excessive weakness, illness, and disease of all kinds.
For how can a conscious part of Deity be sick?--since 'Greater is he
that is with us than all that can strive against us.'"
My
second correspondent, also a woman, sends me the following statement:--
"Life
seemed difficult to me at one time. I
was always breaking down, and had several attacks of what is called nervous
prostration, with terrible insomnia, being on the verge of insanity; besides
having many other troubles, especially of the digestive organs.
I had been sent away from home in charge of doctors, had taken all
the narcotics, stopped all work, been fed up, and in fact knew all the
doctors within reach. But I
never recovered permanently till this New Thought took possession of me.
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