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Sainte-Beuve
has here only the more eminent instances of regeneration in mind, and these
are of course the instructive ones for us also to consider.
These devotees have often laid their course so differently from other
men that, judging them by worldly law, we might be tempted to call them
monstrous aberrations from the path of nature.
I begin therefore by asking a general psychological question as to
what the inner conditions are which may make one human character differ so
extremely from another.
I
reply at once that where the character, as something distinguished from the
intellect, is concerned, the causes of human diversity lie chiefly in our
differing susceptibilities of emotional excitement, and in the different
impulses and inhibitions which these bring in their train.
Let me make this more clear.
Speaking
generally, our moral and practical attitude, at any given time, is always a
resultant of two sets of forces within us, impulses pushing us one way and
obstructions and inhibitions holding us back.
"Yes! yes!" say the impulses; "No! no!" say the
inhibitions. Few people who
have not expressly reflected on the matter realize how constantly this
factor of inhibition is upon us, how it contains and moulds us by its
restrictive pressure almost as if we were fluids pent within the cavity of a
jar. The influence is so
incessant that it becomes subconscious.
All of you, for example, sit here with a certain constraint at this
moment, and entirely without express consciousness of the fact, because of
the influence of the occasion. If
left alone in the room, each of you would probably involuntarily rearrange
himself, and make his attitude more "free and easy."
But proprieties and their inhibitions snap like cobwebs if any great
emotional excitement supervenes. I
have seen a dandy appear in the street with his face covered with
shaving-lather because a house across the way was on fire; and a woman will
run among strangers in her nightgown if it be a question of saving her
baby's life or her own. Take a
self-indulgent woman's life in general.
She will yield to every inhibition set by her disagreeable
sensations, lie late in bed, live upon tea or bromides, keep indoors from
the cold. Every difficulty
finds her obedient to its "no."
But make a mother of her, and what have you?
Possessed by maternal excitement, she now confronts wakefulness,
weariness, and toil without an instant of hesitation or a word of complaint. The
inhibitive power of pain over her is extinguished wherever the baby's
interests are at stake. The
inconveniences which this creature occasions have become, as James Hinton
says, the glowing heart of a great joy, and indeed are now the very
conditions whereby the joy becomes most deep.
This
is an example of what you have already heard of as the "expulsive power
of a higher affection." But
be the affection high or low, it makes no difference, so long as the
excitement it brings be strong enough.
In one of Henry Drummond's discourses he tells of an inundation in
India where an eminence with a bungalow upon it remained unsubmerged, and
became the refuge of a number of wild animals and reptiles in addition to
the human beings who were there. At
a certain moment a royal Bengal tiger appeared swimming towards it, reached
it, and lay panting like a dog upon the ground in the midst of the people,
still possessed by such an agony of terror that one of the Englishmen could
calmly step up with a rifle and blow out its brains.
The tiger's habitual ferocity was temporarily quelled by the emotion
of fear, which became sovereign, and formed a new centre for his character.
Sometimes
no emotional state is sovereign, but many contrary ones are mixed together.
In that case one hears both "yeses" and "noes,"
and the "will" is called on then to solve the conflict.
Take a soldier, for example, with his dread of cowardice impelling
him to advance, his fears impelling him to run, and his propensities to
imitation pushing him towards various courses if his comrades offer various
examples. His person becomes
the seat of a mass of interferences; and he may for a time simply waver,
because no one emotion prevails. There
is a pitch of intensity, though, which, if any emotion reach it, enthrones
that one as alone effective and sweeps its antagonists and all their
inhibitions away. The fury of
his comrades' charge, once entered on, will give this pitch of courage to
the soldier; the panic of their rout will give this pitch of fear.
In these sovereign excitements, things ordinarily impossible grow
natural because the inhibitions are annulled.
Their "no! no!" not only is not heard, it does not exist.
Obstacles are then like tissue-paper hoops to the circus rider--no
impediment; the flood is higher than the dam they make.
"Lass
sie betteln gehn wenn sie hungrig sind!" cries the grenadier, frantic
over his Emperor's capture, when his wife and babes are suggested; and men
pent into a burning theatre have been known to cut their way through the
crowd with knives.[144]
[144]
"'Love would not be love,' says Bourget, 'unless it could carry one to
crime.' And so one may say that
no passion would be a veritable passion unless it could carry one to
crime." (Sighele:
Psychollogie des sectes, p. 136.) In other words, great passions
annul the ordinary inhibitions set by "conscience."
And conversely, of all the criminal human beings, the false,
cowardly, sensual, or cruel persons who actually live, there is perhaps not
one whose criminal impulse may not be at some moment overpowered by the
presence of some other emotion to which his character is also potentially
liable, provided that other emotion be only made intense enough.
Fear is usually the most available emotion for this result in this
particular class of persons. It
stands for conscience, and may here be classed appropriately as a
"higher affection." If
we are soon to die, or if we believe a day of judgment to be near at hand,
how quickly do we put our moral house in order--we do not see how sin can
evermore exert temptation over us! Old-fashioned hell-fire Christianity well
knew how to extract from fear its full equivalent in the way of fruits for
repentance, and its full conversion value.
One
mode of emotional excitability is exceedingly important in the composition
of the energetic character, from its peculiarly destructive power over
inhibitions. I mean what in its
lower form is mere irascibility, susceptibility to wrath, the fighting
temper; and what in subtler ways manifests itself as impatience, grimness,
earnestness, severity of character. Earnestness means willingness to live
with energy, though energy bring pain.
The pain may be pain to other people or pain to one's self--it makes
little difference; for when the strenuous mood is on one, the aim is to
break something, no matter whose or what.
Nothing annihilates an inhibition as irresistibly as anger does it;
for, as Moltke says of war, destruction pure and simple is its essence.
This is what makes it so invaluable an ally of every other passion.
The sweetest delights are trampled on with a ferocious pleasure the
moment they offer themselves as checks to a cause by which our higher
indignations are elicited. It
costs then nothing to drop friendships, to renounce long-rooted privileges
and possessions, to break with social ties.
Rather do we take a stern joy in the astringency and desolation; and
what is called weakness of character seems in most cases to consist in the
inaptitude for these sacrificial moods, of which one's own inferior self and
its pet softnesses must often be the targets and the victims.[145]
[145]
Example: Benjamin Constant was
often marveled at as an extraordinary instance of superior intelligence with
inferior character. He writes
(Journal, Paris, 1895, p. 56), "I am tossed and dragged about by my
miserable weakness. Never was
anything so ridiculous as my indecision.
Now marriage, now solitude; now Germany, now France hesitation upon
hesitation, and all because at bottom I am UNABLE TO GIVE UP ANYTHING."
He can't "get mad" at any of his alternatives; and the
career of a man beset by such an all-round amiability is hopeless.
So
far I have spoken of temporary alterations produced by shifting excitements
in the same person. But the
relatively fixed differences of character of different persons are explained
in a precisely similar way. In
a man with a liability to a special sort of emotion, whole ranges of
inhibition habitually vanish, which in other men remain effective, and other
sorts of inhibition take their place. When
a person has an inborn genius for certain emotions, his life differs
strangely from that of ordinary people, for none of their usual deterrents
check him. Your mere aspirant to a type of character, on the contrary,
only shows, when your natural lover, fighter, or reformer, with whom the
passion is a gift of nature, comes along, the hopeless inferiority of
voluntary to instinctive action. He
has deliberately to overcome his inhibitions; the genius with the inborn
passion seems not to feel them at all; he is free of all that inner friction
and nervous waste. To a Fox, a
Garibaldi, a General Booth, a John Brown, a Louise Michel, a Bradlaugh, the
obstacles omnipotent over those around them are as if non-existent.
Should the rest of us so disregard them, there might be many such
heroes, for many have the wish to live for similar ideals, and only the
adequate degree of inhibition-quenching fury is lacking.[146]
[146]
The great thing which the higher excitabilities give is COURAGE; and the
addition or subtraction of a certain amount of this quality makes a
different man, a different life. Various
excitements let the courage loose. Trustful
hope will do it; inspiring example will do it; love will do it, wrath will
do it. In some people it is
natively so high that the mere touch of danger does it, though danger is for
most men the great inhibitor of action.
"Love of adventure" becomes in such persons a ruling
passion. "I believe,"
says General Skobeleff, "that my bravery is simply the passion and at
the same time the contempt of danger. The
risk of life fills me with an exaggerated rapture. The fewer there are to
share it, the more I like it. The
participation of my body in the event is required to furnish me an adequate
excitement. Everything
intellectual appears to me to be reflex; but a meeting of man to man, a
duel, a danger into which I can throw myself headforemost, attracts me,
moves me, intoxicates me. I am
crazy for it, I love it, I adore it. I
run after danger as one runs after women; I wish it never to stop. Were it
always the same, it would always bring me a new pleasure.
When
I throw myself into an adventure in which I hope to find it, my heart
palpitates with the uncertainty; I could wish at once to have it appear and
yet to delay. A sort of painful
and delicious shiver shakes me; my entire nature runs to meet the peril with
an impetus that my will would in vain try to resist. (Juliette Adam: Le General Skobeleff, Nouvelle Revue, 1886, abridged.)
Skobeleff seems to have been a cruel egoist; but the disinterested
Garibaldi, if one may judge by his "Memorie," lived in an
unflagging emotion of similar danger-seeking excitement.
The
difference between willing and merely wishing, between having ideals that
are creative and ideals that are but pinings and regrets, thus depends
solely either on the amount of steam-pressure chronically driving the
character in the ideal direction, or on the amount of ideal excitement
transiently acquired. Given a
certain amount of love, indignation, generosity, magnanimity, admiration,
loyalty, or enthusiasm of self-surrender, the result is always the same. That whole raft of cowardly obstructions, which in tame
persons and dull moods are sovereign impediments to action, sinks away at
once. Our conventionality,[147]
our shyness, laziness, and stinginess, our demands for precedent and
permission, for guarantee and surety, our small suspicions, timidities,
despairs, where are they now? Severed
like cobwebs, broken like bubbles in the sun--
"Wo sind die Sorge nun und Noth
Die mich noch gestern wollt' erschlaffen?
Ich scham' mich dess' im Morgenroth."
The
flood we are borne on rolls them so lightly under that their very contact is
unfelt. Set free of them, we
float and soar and sing. This
auroral openness and uplift gives to all creative ideal levels a bright and
caroling quality, which is nowhere more marked than where the controlling
emotion is religious. "The
true monk," writes an Italian mystic, "takes nothing with him but
his lyre."
[147]
See the case on p. 69, above, where the writer describes his experiences of
communion with the Divine as consisting "merely in the TEMPORARY
OBLITERATION OF THE CONVENTIONALITIES which usually cover my life."
We
may now turn from these psychological generalities to those fruits of the
religious state which form the special subject of our present lecture.
The man who lives in his religious centre of personal energy, and is
actuated by spiritual enthusiasms, differs from his previous carnal self in
perfectly definite ways.
The
new ardor which burns in his breast consumes in its glow the lower "noes"
which formerly beset him, and keeps him immune against infection from the
entire groveling portion of his nature.
Magnanimities once impossible are now easy; paltry conventionalities
and mean incentives once tyrannical hold no sway.
The stone wall inside of him has fallen, the hardness in his heart
has broken down. The rest of us
can, I think, imagine this by recalling our state of feeling in those
temporary "melting moods" into which either the trials of real
life, or the theatre, or a novel sometimes throws us.
Especially if we weep! For
it is then as if our tears broke through an inveterate inner dam, and let
all sorts of ancient peccancies and moral stagnancies drain away, leaving us
now washed and soft of heart and open to every nobler leading. With most of us the customary hardness quickly returns, but
not so with saintly persons. Many
saints, even as energetic ones as Teresa and Loyola, have possessed what the
church traditionally reveres as a special grace, the so-called gift of
tears. In these persons the
melting mood seems to have held almost uninterrupted control.
And as it is with tears and melting moods, so it is with other
exalted affections. Their reign
may come by gradual growth or by a crisis; but in either case it may have
"come to stay."
At
the end of the last lecture we saw this permanence to be true of the general
paramountcy of the higher insight, even though in the ebbs of emotional
excitement meaner motives might temporarily prevail and backsliding might
occur. But that lower
temptations may remain completely annulled, apart from transient emotion and
as if by alteration of the man's habitual nature, is also proved by
documentary evidence in certain cases.
Before embarking on the general natural history of the regenerate
character, let me convince you of this curious fact by one or two examples.
The most numerous are those of reformed drunkards.
You recollect the case of Mr. Hadley in the last lecture; the Jerry
McAuley Water Street Mission abounds in similar instances.[148]
You also remember the graduate of Oxford, converted at three in the
afternoon, and getting drunk in the hay-field the next day, but after that
permanently cured of his appetite. "From
that hour drink has had no terrors for me:
I never touch it, never want it.
The same thing occurred with my pipe. . . . the desire for it went at
once and has never returned. So
with every known sin, the deliverance in each case being permanent and
complete. I have had no
temptations since conversion."
[148]
Above, p. 200. "The only
radical remedy I know for dipsomania is religiomania," is a saying I
have heard quoted from some medical man.
Here
is an analogous case from Starbuck's manuscript collection:--
"I
went into the old Adelphi Theatre, where there was a Holiness meeting, . . .
and I began saying, 'Lord, Lord, I must have this blessing.'
Then what was to me an audible voice said:
'Are you willing to give up everything to the Lord?' and question
after question kept coming up, to all of which I said:
'Yes, Lord; yes, Lord!' until this came:
'Why do you not accept it NOW?' and I said:
'I do, Lord.'--I felt no particular joy, only a trust.
Just then the meeting closed, and, as I went out on the street, I met
a gentleman smoking a fine cigar, and a cloud of smoke came into my face,
and I took a long, deep breath of it, and praise the Lord, all my appetite
for it was gone. Then as I
walked along the street, passing saloons where the fumes of liquor came out,
I found that all my taste and longing for that accursed stuff was gone. Glory to God! . . . [But] for ten or eleven long years [after
that] I was in the wilderness with its ups and downs. My appetite for liquor never came back."
The
classic case of Colonel Gardiner is that of a man cured of sexual temptation
in a single hour. To Mr. Spears
the colonel said, "I was effectually cured of all inclination to that
sin I was so strongly addicted to that I thought nothing but shooting me
through the head could have cured me of it; and all desire and inclination
to it was removed, as entirely as if I had been a sucking child; nor did the
temptation return to this day." Mr.
Webster's words on the same subject are these:
"One thing I have heard the colonel frequently say, that he was
much addicted to impurity before his acquaintance with religion; but that,
so soon as he was enlightened from above, he felt the power of the Holy
Ghost changing his nature so wonderfully that his sanctification in this
respect seemed more remarkable than in any other."[149]
[149]
Doddridge's Life of Colonel James Gardiner, London Religious Tract Society,
pp. 23-32.
Such
rapid abolition of ancient impulses and propensities reminds us so strongly
of what has been observed as the result of hypnotic suggestion that it is
difficult not to believe that subliminal influences play the decisive part
in these abrupt changes of heart, just as they do in hypnotism.[150]
Suggestive therapeutics abound in records of cure, after a few sittings, of
inveterate bad habits with which the patient, left to ordinary moral and
physical influences, had struggled in vain.
Both drunkenness and sexual vice have been cured in this way, action
through the subliminal seeming thus in many individuals to have the
prerogative of inducing relatively stable change.
If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates
through the subliminal door, then. But
just HOW anything operates in this region is still unexplained, and we shall
do well now to say good-by to the PROCESS of transformation
altogether--leaving it, if you like, a good deal of a psychological or
theological mystery--and to turn our attention to the fruits of the
religious condition, no matter in what way they may have been produced.[151]
[150]
Here, for example, is a case, from Starbuck's book, in which a "sensory
automatism" brought about quickly what prayers and resolves had been
unable to effect. The subject
is a woman. She writes:--
"When
I was about forty I tried to quit smoking, but the desire was on me, and had
me in its power. I cried and
prayed and promised God to quit, but could not.
I had smoked for fifteen years.
When I was fifty-three, as I sat by the fire one day smoking, a voice
came to me. I did not hear it
with my ears, but more as a dream or sort of double think.
It said, 'Louisa, lay down smoking.'
At once I replied. 'Will you take the desire away?' But it only kept
saying: 'Louisa, lay down
smoking.' Then I got up, laid
my pipe on the mantel-shelf, and never smoked again or had any desire to.
The desire was gone as though I had never known it or touched
tobacco. The sight of others
smoking and the smell of smoke never gave me the least wish to touch it
again." The
Psychology of Religion, p. 142.
[151]
Professor Starbuck expresses the radical destruction of old influences
physiologically, as a cutting off of the connection between higher and lower
cerebral centres. "This
condition," he says, "in which the association-centres connected
with the spiritual life are cut off from the lower, is often reflected in
the way correspondents describe their experiences. . . . For example: 'Temptations
from without still assail me, but there is nothing WITHIN to respond to
them.' The ego [here] is wholly identified with the higher centres whose
quality of feeling is that of withinness.
Another of the respondents says:
'Since then, although Satan tempts me, there is as it were a wall of
brass around me, so that his darts cannot touch me.'" --Unquestionably,
functional exclusions of this sort must occur in the cerebral organ.
But on the side accessible to introspection, their causal condition
is nothing but the degree of spiritual excitement, getting at last so high
and strong as to be sovereign, and it must be frankly confessed that we do
not know just why or how such sovereignty comes about in one person and not
in another. We can only give
our imagination a certain delusive help by mechanical analogies.
If
we should conceive, for example, that the human mind, with its different
possibilities of equilibrium, might be like a many-sided solid with
different surfaces on which it could lie flat, we might liken mental
revolutions to the spatial revolutions of such a body.
As it is pried up, say by a lever, from a position in which it lies
on surface A, for instance, it will linger for a time unstably halfway up,
and if the lever cease to urge it, it will tumble back or
"relapse" under the continued pull of gravity.
But if at last it rotate far enough for its centre of gravity to pass
beyond surface A altogether, the body will fall over, on surface B, say, and
abide there permanently. The
pulls of gravity towards A have vanished, and may now be disregarded. The
polyhedron has become immune against farther attraction from their
direction.
In
this figure of speech the lever may correspond to the emotional influences
making for a new life, and the initial pull of gravity to the ancient
drawbacks and inhibitions. So
long as the emotional influence fails to reach a certain pitch of efficacy,
the changes it produces are unstable, and the man relapses into his original
attitude. But when a certain intensity is attained by the new emotion, a
critical point is passed, and there then ensues an irreversible revolution,
equivalent to the production of a new nature.
The
collective name for the ripe fruits of religion in a character is
Saintliness.[152] The saintly character is the character for which spiritual
emotions are the habitual centre of the personal energy; and there is a
certain composite photograph of universal saintliness, the same in all
religions, of which the features can easily be traced.[153]
[152]
I use this word in spite of a certain flavor of
"sanctimoniousness" which sometimes clings to it, because no other
word suggests as well the exact combination of affections which the text
goes on to describe.
[153]
"It will be found," says Dr. W. R. Inge (in his lectures on
Christian Mysticism, London, 1899, p. 326), "that men of preeminent
saintliness agree very closely in what they tell us.
They tell us that they have arrived at an unshakable conviction, not
based on inference but on immediate experience, that God is a spirit with
whom the human spirit can hold intercourse; that in him meet all that they
can imagine of goodness, truth, and beauty; that they can see his footprints
everywhere in nature, and feel his presence within them as the very life of
their life, so that in proportion as they come to themselves they come to
him. They tell us what
separates us from him and from happiness is, first, self-seeking in all its
forms; and secondly, sensuality in all its forms; that these are the ways of
darkness and death, which hide from us the face of God; while the path of
the just is like a shining light, which shineth more and more unto the
perfect day."
They
are these:--
1.
A feeling of being in a wider life than that of this world's selfish
little interests; and a conviction, not merely intellectual, but as it were
sensible, of the existence of an Ideal Power.
In Christian saintliness this power is always personified as God; but
abstract moral ideals, civic or patriotic utopias, or inner versions of
holiness or right may also be felt as the true lords and enlargers of our
life, in ways which I described in the lecture on the Reality of the
Unseen.[154]
[154]
The "enthusiasm of humanity" may lead to a life which coalesces in
many respects with that of Christian saintliness. Take the following rules proposed to members of the Union
pour l'Action morale, in the Bulletin de l'Union, April 1-15, 1894.
See, also, Revue Bleue, August 13, 1892.
"We
would make known in our own persons the usefulness of rule, of discipline,
of resignation and renunciation; we would teach the necessary perpetuity of
suffering, and explain the creative part which it plays.
We would wage war upon false optimism; on the base hope of happiness
coming to us ready made; on the notion of a salvation by knowledge alone, or
by material civilization alone, vain symbol as this is of civilization,
precarious external arrangement ill-fitted to replace the intimate union and
consent of souls. We would wage
war also on bad morals, whether in public or in private life; on luxury,
fastidiousness, and over-refinement, on all that tends to increase the
painful, immoral, and anti-social multiplications of our wants; on all that
excites envy and dislike in the soul of the common people, and confirms the
notion that the chief end of life is freedom to enjoy.
We would preach by our example the respect of superiors and equals,
the respect of all men; affectionate simplicity in our relations with
inferiors and insignificant persons; indulgence where our own claims only
are concerned, but firmness in our demands where they relate to duties
towards others or towards the public.
"For
the common people are what we help them to become; their vices are our
vices, gazed upon, envied, and imitated; and if they come back with all
their weight upon us, it is but just.
2.
A sense of the friendly continuity of the ideal power with our own
life, and a willing self-surrender to its control.
3.
An immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of the confining
selfhood melt down.
4.
A shifting of the emotional centre towards loving and harmonious
affections, towards "yes, yes," and away from "no,"
where the claims of the non-ego are concerned. These fundamental inner
conditions have characteristic practical consequences, as follows:--
a.
Asceticism.--The self-surrender may become so passionate as to turn
into self-immolation. It may
then so over-rule the ordinary inhibitions of the flesh that the saint finds
positive pleasure in sacrifice and asceticism, measuring and expressing as
they do the degree of his loyalty to the higher power.
b.
Strength of Soul.--The sense of enlargement of life may be so
uplifting that personal motives and inhibitions, commonly omnipotent, become
too insignificant for notice, and new reaches of patience and fortitude open
out. Fears and anxieties go,
and blissful equanimity takes their place. Come heaven, come hell, it makes
no difference now!
"We
forbid ourselves all seeking after popularity, all ambition to appear
important. We pledge ourselves
to abstain from falsehood, in all its degrees.
We promise not to create or encourage illusions as to what is
possible, by what we say or write. We promise to one another active
sincerity, which strives to see truth clearly, and which never fears to
declare what it sees.
"We
promise deliberate resistance to the tidal waves of fashion, to the 'booms'
and panics of the public mind, to all the forms of weakness and of fear.
"We
forbid ourselves the use of sarcasm. Of
serious things we will speak seriously and unsmilingly, without banter and
without the appearance of banter;--and even so of all things, for there are
serious ways of being light of heart.
"We
will put ourselves forward always for what we are, simply and without false
humility, as well as without pedantry, affectation, or pride."
c.
Purity.--The shifting of the emotional centre brings with it, first,
increase of purity. The sensitiveness to spiritual discords is enhanced, and the
cleansing of existence from brutal and sensual elements becomes imperative.
Occasions of contact with such elements are avoided:
the saintly life must deepen its spiritual consistency and keep
unspotted from the world. In
some temperaments this need of purity of spirit takes an ascetic turn, and
weaknesses of the flesh are treated with relentless severity.
d.
Charity.--The shifting of the emotional centre brings, secondly,
increase of charity, tenderness for fellow-creatures. The ordinary motives
to antipathy, which usually set such close bounds to tenderness among human
beings, are inhibited. The saint loves his enemies, and treats loathsome
beggars as his brothers.
I
now have to give some concrete illustrations of these fruits of the
spiritual tree. The only
difficulty is to choose, for they are so abundant.
Since
the sense of Presence of a higher and friendly power seems to be the
fundamental feature in the spiritual life, I will begin with that.
In
our narratives of conversion we saw how the world might look shining and
transfigured to the convert,[155] and, apart from anything acutely
religious, we all have moments when the universal life seems to wrap us
round with friendliness. In youth and health, in summer, in the woods or on
the mountains, there come days when the weather seems all whispering with
peace, hours when the goodness and beauty of existence enfold us like a dry
warm climate, or chime through us as if our inner ears were subtly ringing
with the world's security. Thoreau
writes:--
[155]
Above, pp. 243 ff.
"Once,
a few weeks after I came to the woods, for an hour I doubted whether the
near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life.
To be alone was somewhat unpleasant. But, in the midst of a gentle
rain, while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet
and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in
<270> every sight and sound around my house, an infinite and
unaccountable friendliness all at once, like an atmosphere, sustaining me,
as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I
have never thought of them since. Every
little pine-needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me.
I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred
to me, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again."[156]
[156]
H. Thoreau: Walden, Riverside
edition, p. 206, abridged.
In
the Christian consciousness this sense of the enveloping friendliness
becomes most personal and definite. "The
compensation," writes a German author,--"for the loss of that
sense of personal independence which man so unwillingly gives up, is the
disappearance of all FEAR from one's life, the quite indescribable and
inexplicable feeling of an inner SECURITY, which one can only experience,
but which, once it has been experienced, one can never forget."[157]
[157]
C. H. Hilty: Gluck, vol. i. p.
85.
I
find an excellent description of this state of mind in a sermon by Mr.
Voysey:--
"It
is the experience of myriads of trustful souls, that this sense of God's
unfailing presence with them in their going out and in their coming in, and
by night and day, is a source of absolute repose and confident calmness.
It drives away all fear of what may befall them.
That nearness of God is a constant security against terror and
anxiety. It is not that they
are at all assured of physical safety, or deem themselves protected by a
love which is denied to others, but that they are in a state of mind equally
ready to be safe or to meet with injury.
If injury befall them, they will be content to bear it because the
Lord is their keeper, and nothing can befall them without his will.
If it be his will, then injury is for them a blessing and no calamity
at all. Thus and thus only is
the trustful man protected and shielded from harm.
And I for one--by no means a thick-skinned or hard-nerved man-am
absolutely satisfied with this arrangement, and do not wish for any other
kind of immunity from danger and catastrophe.
Quite as sensitive to pain as the most highly strung organism, I yet
feel that the worst of it is conquered, and the sting taken out of it
altogether, by the thought that God is our loving and sleepless keeper, and
that nothing can hurt us without his will."[158]
[158]
The Mystery of Pain and Death, London, 1892, p. 258.
More
excited expressions of this condition are abundant in religious literature.
I could easily weary you with their monotony. Here is an account from
Mrs. Jonathan Edwards:--
"Last
night," Mrs. Edwards writes, "was the sweetest night I ever had in
my life. I never before, for so
long a time together, enjoyed so much of the light and rest and sweetness of
heaven in my soul, but without the least agitation of body during the whole
time. Part of the night I lay
awake, sometimes asleep, and sometimes between sleeping and waking. But all night I continued in a constant, clear, and lively
sense of the heavenly sweetness of Christ's excellent love, of his nearness
to me, and of my dearness to him; with an inexpressibly sweet calmness of
soul in an entire rest in him. I
seemed to myself to perceive a glow of divine love come down from the heart
of Christ in heaven into my heart in a constant stream, like a stream or
pencil of sweet light. At the
same time my heart and soul all flowed out in love to Christ, so that there
seemed to be a constant flowing and reflowing of heavenly love, and I
appeared to myself to float or swim, in these bright, sweet beams, like the
motes swimming in the beams of the sun, or the streams of his light which
come in at the window. I think
that what I felt each minute was worth more than all the outward comfort and
pleasure which I had enjoyed in my whole life put together.
It was pleasure, without the least sting, or any interruption.
It was a sweetness, which my soul was lost in; it seemed to be all
that my feeble frame could sustain. There
was but little difference, whether I was asleep or awake, but if there was
any difference, the sweetness was greatest while I was asleep.[159]
As I awoke early the next morning, it seemed to me that I had
entirely done with myself. I
felt that the opinions of the world concerning me were nothing, and that I
had no more to do with any outward interest of my own than with that of a
person whom I never saw. The glory of God seemed to swallow up every wish
and desire of my heart. . . . After retiring to rest and sleeping a little
while, I awoke, and was led to reflect on God's mercy to me, in giving me,
for many years, a willingness to die; and after that, in making me willing
to live, that I might do and suffer whatever he called me to here.
I also thought how God had graciously given me an entire resignation
to his will, with respect to the kind and manner of death that I should die;
having been made willing to die on the rack, or at the stake, and if it were
God's will, to die in darkness. But
now it occurred to me, I used to think of living no longer than to the
ordinary age of man. Upon this
I was led to ask myself, whether I was not willing to be kept out of heaven
even longer; and my whole heart seemed immediately to reply:
Yes, a thousand years, and a thousand in horror, if it be most for
the honor of God, the torment of my body being so great, awful, and
overwhelming that none could bear to live in the country where the spectacle
was seen, and the torment of my mind being vastly greater.
And it seemed to me that I found a perfect willingness, quietness,
and alacrity of soul in consenting that it should be so, if it were most for
the glory of God, so that there was no hesitation, doubt, or darkness in my
mind. The glory of God seemed
to overcome me and swallow me up, and every conceivable suffering, and
everything that was terrible to my nature, seemed to shrink to nothing
before it. This resignation
continued in its clearness and brightness the rest of the night, and all the
next day, and the night following, and on Monday in the forenoon, without
interruption or abatement."[160]
[159]
Compare Madame Guyon: "It
was my practice to arise at midnight for purposes of devotion. . . . It
seemed to me that God came at the precise time and woke me from sleep in
order that I might enjoy him. When
I was out of health or greatly fatigued, he did not awake me, but at such
times I felt, even in my sleep, a singular possession of God.
He loved me so much that he seemed to pervade my being, at a time
when I could be only imperfectly conscious of his presence.
My sleep is sometimes broken--a sort of half sleep; but my soul seems
to be awake enough to know God, when it is hardly capable of knowing
anything else." T. C.
Upham: The Life and Religious
Experiences of Madame de la Mothe Guyon, New York, 1877, vol. i. p. 260.
[160]
I have considerably abridged the words of the original, which is given in
Edwards's Narrative of the Revival in New England.
The
annals of Catholic saintship abound in records as ecstatic or more ecstatic
than this. "Often the
assaults of the divine love," it is said of the Sister Seraphique de la
Martiniere, "reduced her almost to the point of death. She used tenderly to complain of this to God.
'I cannot support it,' she used to say.
'Bear
gently with my weakness, or I shall expire under the violence of your
love.'"[161]
[161]
Bougaud: Hist. de la
Bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, 1894, p. 125.
Let
me pass next to the Charity and Brotherly Love which are a usual fruit of
saintliness, and have always been reckoned essential theological virtues,
however limited may have been the kinds of service which the particular
theology enjoined. Brotherly love would follow logically from the assurance
of God's friendly presence, the notion of our brotherhood as men being an
immediate inference from that of God's fatherhood of us all.
When Christ utters the precepts:
"Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them
that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute
you," he gives for a reason: "That
ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven:
for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and
sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust."
One might therefore be tempted to explain both the humility as to
one's self and the charity towards others which characterize spiritual
excitement, as results of the all-leveling character of theistic belief.
But these affections are certainly not mere derivatives of theism.
We find them in Stoicism, in Hinduism, and in Buddhism in the highest
possible degree. They HARMONIZE with paternal theism beautifully; but they
harmonize with all reflection whatever upon the dependence of mankind on
general causes; and we must, I think, consider them not subordinate but
coordinate parts of that great complex excitement in the study of which we
are engaged. Religious rapture, moral enthusiasm, ontological wonder, cosmic
emotion, are all unifying states of mind, in which the sand and grit of the
selfhood incline to disappear, and tenderness to rule.
The best thing is to describe the condition integrally as a
characteristic affection to which our nature is liable, a region in which we
find ourselves at home, a sea in which we swim; but not to pretend to
explain its parts by deriving them too cleverly from one another.
Like love or fear, the faith-state is a natural psychic complex, and
carries charity with it by organic consequence.
Jubilation is an expansive affection, and all expansive affections
are self-forgetful and kindly so long as they endure.
We
find this the case even when they are pathological in origin.
In his instructive work, la Tristesse et la Joie,[162] M. Georges
Dumas compares together the melancholy and the joyous phase of circular
insanity, and shows that, while selfishness characterizes the one, the other
is marked by altruistic impulses. No human being so stingy and useless as was Marie in her
melancholy period! But the
moment the happy period begins, "sympathy and kindness become her
characteristic sentiments. She
displays a universal goodwill, not only of intention, but in act. . . . She becomes solicitous of the health of other patients,
interested in getting them out, desirous to procure wool to knit socks for
some of them. Never since she has been under my observation have I heard her
in her joyous period utter any but charitable opinions."[163]
And later, Dr. Dumas says of all such joyous conditions that
"unselfish sentiments and tender emotions are the only affective states
to be found in them. The
subject's mind is closed against envy, hatred, and vindictiveness, and
wholly transformed into benevolence, indulgence, and mercy."[164]
[162]
Paris, 1900.
[163]
Page 130.
[164]
Page 167.
There
is thus an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their
companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise.
Along with the happiness, this increase of tenderness is often noted
in narratives of conversion. "I began to work for
others";--"I had more tender feeling for my family and
friends";--"I spoke at once to a person with whom I had been
angry";--"I felt for every one, and loved my friends
better";--"I felt every one to be my friend";--these are so
many expressions from the records collected by Professor Starbuck.[165]
[165]
Op. cit., p. 127.
"When,"
says Mrs. Edwards, continuing the narrative from which I made quotation a
moment ago, "I arose on the morning of the Sabbath, I felt a love to
all mankind, wholly peculiar in its strength and sweetness, far beyond all
that I had ever felt before. The
power of that love seemed inexpressible.
I thought, if I were surrounded by enemies, who were venting their
malice and cruelty upon me, in tormenting me, it would still be impossible
that I should cherish any feelings towards them but those of love, and pity,
and ardent desires for their happiness.
I never before felt so far from a disposition to judge and censure
others, as I did that morning. I
realized also, in an unusual and very lively manner, how great a part of
Christianity lies in the performance of our social and relative duties to
one another. The same joyful
sense continued throughout the day--a sweet love to God and all
mankind."
Whatever
be the explanation of the charity, it may efface all usual human
barriers.[166]
[166]
The barrier between men and animals also.
We read of Towianski, an eminent Polish patriot and mystic, that
"one day one of his friends met him in the rain, caressing a big dog
which was jumping upon him and covering him horribly with mud.
On being asked why he permitted the animal thus to dirty his clothes,
Towianski replied: 'This dog,
whom I am now meeting for the first time, has shown a great fellow-feeling
for me, and a great joy in my recognition and acceptance of his greetings.
Were I to drive him off, I should wound his feelings and do him a
moral injury. It would be an offense not only to him, but to all the
spirits of the other world who are on the same level with him. The damage which he does to my coat is as nothing in
comparison with the wrong which I should inflict upon him, in case I were to
remain indifferent to the manifestations of his friendship. We ought,' he added, 'both to lighten the condition of
animals, whenever we can, and at the same time to facilitate in ourselves
that union of the world of all spirits, which the sacrifice of Christ has
made possible.'" Andre Towianski, Traduction de l'Italien, Turin, 1897
(privately printed). I owe my
knowledge of this book and of Towianski to my friend Professor W.
Lutoslawski, author of "Plato's Logic."
Here,
for instance, is an example of Christian non-resistance from Richard
Weaver's autobiography. Weaver
was a collier, a semi-professional pugilist in his younger days, who became
a much beloved evangelist. Fighting,
after drinking, seems to have been the sin to which he originally felt his
flesh most perversely inclined. After
his first conversion he had a backsliding, which consisted in pounding a man
who had insulted a girl. Feeling
that, having once fallen, he might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a
lamb, he got drunk and went and broke the jaw of another man who had lately
challenged him to fight and taunted him with cowardice for refusing as a
Christian man;--I mention these incidents to show how genuine a change of
heart is implied in the later conduct which he describes as follows:--
"I
went down the drift and found the boy crying because a fellow-workman was
trying to take the wagon from him by force.
I said to him:--
"'Tom,
you mustn't take that wagon.'
"He
swore at me, and called me a Methodist devil.
I told him that God did not tell me to let him rob me.
He cursed again, and said he would push the wagon over me.
"'Well,'
I said, 'let us see whether the devil and thee are stronger than the Lord
and me.'
"And
the Lord and I proving stronger than the devil and he, he had to get out of
the way, or the wagon would have gone over him.
So
I gave the wagon to the boy. Then
said Tom:--
"'I've
a good mind to smack thee on the face.'
"'Well,'
I said, 'if that will do thee any good, thou canst do it.' So he struck me
on the face.
"I
turned the other cheek to him, and said, 'Strike again.'
"He
struck again and again, till he had struck me five times. I turned my cheek
for the sixth stroke; but he turned away cursing.
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