 15. So much for mere devotion, divorced from the intellectual conceptions which might guide it towards bearing useful human fruit. The next saintly virtue in which we find excess is purity. In theopathic characters, like those whom we have just considered, the love of God must not be mixed with any other love. Father and mother, sisters, brothers, and friends are felt as interfering distractions for sensitiveness and narrowness when they occur together, as they often do, require above all things, a simplified world to dwell in. Variety and confusion are too much for their powers of comfortable adaptation. But whereas your aggressive pietist reaches his unity objectively, by forcibly stamping disorder and divergence out, your retiring pietist reaches his subjectively, leaving disorder in the world at large, but making a smaller world in which he dwells himself, and from which he eliminates it altogether. Thus, alongside of the Church, militant with its prisons, dragonades, and inquisition methods, we have the Church Fijunt, as one might call it, with its hermitages, monasteries, and sectarian organizations, both Churches pursuing the same object, to unify the life and simplify the spectacle presented to the soul. On this subject, I refer to the work of M. Murissier, who makes inner unification the mainspring of the whole religious life. But all strongly ideal interests, religious or irreligious, unify the mind and tend to subordinate everything to themselves. One would infer from M. Murissier's pages that this formal condition was peculiarly characteristic of religion, and that one might, in compassion, almost neglect material content in studying the latter. I trust that the present work will convince the reader that religion has plenty of material content which is characteristic, and which is more important by far than any general psychological form. In spite of this criticism, I find M. Murissier's book highly instructive. A mind extremely sensitive to inner discords will drop one external relation after another, as interfering with the absorption of consciousness in spiritual things. Amusements must go first, then conventional society, then business, then family duties, until at last, seclusion, with a subdivision of the day into hours for stated religious acts, is the only thing that can be borne. The lives of saints are a history of successive renunciations of complication, one form of contact with the outer life being dropped after another, to save the purity of inner tone. Footnote. Example. Quote. At the first beginning of the servitors, that is Henry Suso's interior life, after he had purified his soul properly by confession, he marked out for himself in thought three circles within which he shut himself up, as in a spiritual entrenchment. The first circle was his cell, his chapel, and the choir. When he was within this circle, he seemed to himself in complete security. The second circle was the whole monastery, as far as the outer gate. The third and outermost circle was the gate itself, and here it was necessary for him to stand well upon his guard. When he went outside these circles, it seemed to him that he was in the plight of some wild animal which is outside its hole, and surrounded by the hunt, and therefore in need of all its cunning and watchfulness. Close Quote. End Footnote. A young sister asks her superior, quote, Is it not better that I should not speak at all during the hour of recreation, so as not to run the risk, by speaking, of falling into some sin of which I might not be conscious? Close Quote. If the life remains a soul shawon at all, those who take part in it must follow one identical rule. Inbosomed in this monotony, the zealot for purity feels clean and free once more. The minuteness of uniformity maintained in certain sectarian communities, whether monastic or not, is something almost inconceivable to a man of the world. Costume, phraseology, hours, and habits are absolutely stereotyped, and there is no doubt that some persons are so made as to find in this stability an incomparable kind of mental rest. We have no time to multiply examples, so I will let the case of St. Louis of Gonzaga serve as a type of excess in purification. I think you will agree that this youth carried the elimination of the external and discordant to a point which we cannot unreservedly admire. At the age of ten, his biographer says, quote, the inspiration came to him to consecrate to the mother of God his own virginity, that being to her the most agreeable of possible presence. Without delay then, and with all the fervor there was in him, joyous of heart and burning with love, he made his vow of perpetual chastity. St. Louis accepted the offering of his innocent heart and obtained for him from God as a recompense the extraordinary grace of never feeling during his entire life the slightest touch of temptation against the virtue of purity. This was an altogether exceptional favor, rarely accorded even to saints themselves, and all the more marvelous in that Louis dealt always in courts among great folks where danger and opportunity are so unusually frequent. It is true that Louis, from his earliest childhood, had shown a natural repugnance for whatever might be impure or unvirginal and even for relations of any sort whatever between persons of opposite sex. But this made it all the more surprising that he should, especially since this vow, feel it necessary to have recourse to such a number of obedience for protecting against even the shadow of danger the virginity which he had thus consecrated. One might suppose that if anyone could have contented himself with the ordinary precautions prescribed for all Christians, it would assuredly have been he, but no, in the use of preservatives and means of defense, in flight from the most insignificant occasions, from every possibility of peril just as in the mortification of his flesh he went farther than the majority of saints. He, who by an extraordinary protection of God's grace was never tempted, measured all the steps as if he were threatened on every side by particular dangers. Thenceforward he never raised his eyes either when walking in the streets or when in society. Not only did he avoid all business with females even more scrupulously than before, but he renounced all conversation and every kind of social recreation with them, although his father tried to make him take part, and he commenced only too early to deliver his innocent body to austerities of every kind. Close quote. At the age of twelve we read of this young man that, quote, if by chance his mother sent one of her maids of honour to him with a message, he never allowed her to come in, but listened to her through the barely opened door, and dismissed her immediately. He did not like to be alone with his own mother, whether at table or in conversation, and when the rest of the company withdrew he sought also a pretext for retiring. Several great ladies, relatives of his, he avoided learning to know even by sight, and he made a sort of treaty with his father engaging promptly and readily to accede to all his wishes if he might only be excused from all visits to ladies. Close quote. When he was seventeen years old, Luis joined the Jesuit order against his father's passionate entreaties, for he was heir of a princely house, and when a year later the father died he took the loss as a particular attention to himself on God's part and wrote letters of stilted good advice as from a spiritual superior to his own grieving mother. Footnote. In his boyish notebook he praises the monastic life for its freedom from sin and for the imperishable treasures which it enables us to store up, quote, of merit in God's eyes which makes of him our debtor for all eternity. Close quote. End footnote. He soon became so good a monk that if anyone asked him the number of his brothers and sisters he had to reflect and count them over before replying. A father asked him one day if he were never troubled by the thought of his family, to which, I never think of them except when praying for them was his only answer. Never was he seen to hold in his hand a flower or anything perfumed that he might take pleasure in it. On the contrary, in the hospital he used to seek for whatever was most disgusting and eagerly snatched the bandages of ulcers, etc., from the hands of his companions. He avoided worldly talk and immediately tried to turn every conversation on to pious subjects or else he remained silent. He systematically refused to notice his surroundings. Being ordered one day to bring a book from the rector's seat in the refectory, he had to ask where the rector sat, for in the three months he had eaten bread there, so carefully did he guard his eyes that he had not noticed the place. One day during recess, having looked by chance on one of his companions, he reproached himself as for a grave sin against modesty. He cultivated silence as preserving from sins of the tongue and his greatest penance was the limit which his superiors set to his bodily penances. He sought, after false accusations and unjust reprimands, as opportunities of humility and such was his obedience that, when a roommate, having no more paper, asked him for a sheet, he did not feel free to give it to him without first obtaining the permission of the superior, who, as such, stood in the place of God and transmitted his orders. I can find no other sorts of fruit than this of Louise's saintship. He died in 1591 in his 29th year and is known in the church as the patron of all young people. On his festival, the altar in the chapel devoted to him on a certain church in Rome, quote, is embosomed with flowers arranged with exquisite taste and a pile of letters may be seen at its foot written to the saint by young men and women and directed to Paradiso. They are supposed to be burnt, unread, except by San Luigi, who must find singular petitions in these pretty little missives, tied up now with a green ribbon, expressive of hope, now with a red one, emblematic of love, et cetera. Footnote. I cannot resist the temptation to, quote, from Starbuck's book, page 388, another case of purification by elimination. It runs as follows, quote, the signs of abnormality which sanctified persons show are of frequent occurrence. They get out of tune with other people. Often they will have nothing to do with churches which they regard as worldly. They become hypercritical towards others. They grow careless of their social, political, and financial obligations. As an instance of this type, maybe mentioned a woman of sixty-eight, of whom the writer made a special study. She had been a member of one of the most active and progressive churches in a busy part of a large city. Her pastor described her as having reached the censorious stage. She had grown more and more out of sympathy with the church. Her connection with it finally consisted simply in attendance at prayer meeting, at which her only message was that of reproof and condemnation of the others for living on a low plain. At last she withdrew from fellowship with any church. The writer found her living alone in a little room on the top story of a cheap boarding house, quite out of touch with all human relations, but apparently happy in the enjoyment of her own spiritual blessings. Her time was occupied in writing booklets on sanctification, page after page of dreamy rhapsody. She proved to be one of a small group of persons who claimed that entire salvation involves three steps instead of two. Not only must there be conversion and sanctification, but a third, which they call crucifixion or perfect redemption, and which seems to bear the same relation to sanctification that this bears to conversion. She related how the spirit had said to her, Stop going to church. Stop going to holiness meetings. Go to your own room and I will teach you. She professes to care nothing for colleges or preachers but only cares to listen to what God says to her. Her description of the experience seemed entirely consistent. She is happy and contented and her life is entirely satisfactory to herself. While listening to her own story one was tempted to forget that it was from the life of a person who could not live by it in conjunction with her fellows. Close quote. End footnote. Our final judgment of the worth of such a life as this will depend largely on our conception of God and of the sort of conduct he is best pleased with in his creatures. The Catholicism of the 16th century paid little heed to social righteousness and to leave the world to the devil whilst saving one's own soul was then accounted no discreditable scheme. Today, rightly or wrongly, helpfulness in general human affairs is, in consequence of one of those secular mutations and moral sentiment of which I spoke, deemed an essential element of worth in character and to be of some public or private use is also reckoned as a species of divine surface. Other early Jesuits, especially the missionaries among them the Javieres, the Braebofs, the Jugs were objective minds and fought in their way for the world's welfare so their lives today inspire us. But when the intellect, as in this Louise, is originally no larger than a pin's head and cherishes ideas of God of corresponding smallness, the result notwithstanding the heroism put forth is on the whole repulsive. Purity, we see in the object is not the one thing needful and it is better that a life should contract many a dirt mark than forfeit usefulness in its efforts to remain unspotted. Proceeding onwards in our search of religious extravagance, we next come upon excesses of tenderness and charity. Here, saintliness has to face the charge of preserving the unfit and breeding parasites and beggars. Resist not evil. Love your enemies. These are saintly maxims on which men of this world find it hard to speak without impatience. Are the men of this world right? Or are the saints in possession of the deeper range of truth? No simple answer is possible. Here, if anywhere, one feels the complexity of the moral life and the mysteriousness of the way in which acts and ideals are interwoven. Perfect conduct is a relation between three terms, the actor, the objects for which he acts, and the recipients of the action. In order that conduct should be abstractly perfect, all three terms, intention, execution, and reception should be suited to one another. The best intention will fail if it either work on false means or address itself to the wrong recipient. Thus, no critic or estimator of the value of conduct can confine himself to the actor's animus alone, apart from the other elements of the performance. If there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa constrictors. The saint may simply give the universe into the hands of the enemy by his trustfulness. He may, by non-resistance, cut off his own survival. Herbert Spencer tells us that the perfect man's conduct will appear perfect only when the environment is perfect. To know inferior environment is it suitably adapted. We may paraphrase this by cordially admitting that saintly conduct would be the most perfect conduct conceivable in an environment where all were saints already. But by adding that in an environment where few are saints and many the exact reverse of saints it must be ill adapted, we must frankly confess then, using our empirical common sense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in the world that actually is the virtues of sympathy, charity and non-resistance may be and often have been manifested in excess. The powers of darkness have systematically taken advantage of them. The whole modern scientific organization of charity is a consequence of the failure of simply giving alms. The whole history of constitutional government is a commentary on the excellence of resisting evil and when one cheek is smitten of smiting back and not turning the other cheek also. You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the gospel in spite of Quakerism in spite of Tolstoy you believe in fighting fire with fire in shooting down usurpers locking up thieves and freezing out vagabonds and swindlers. And yet you are sure as I am sure that we're the world confined to these heated, hard-hearted and hard-fisted methods exclusively where there no one prompt to help a brother first and find out afterwards whether he were worthy, no one willing to drown his private wrongs and pity for the wronger's person, no one ready to be duped many a time rather than live always on suspicion, no one glad to treat individuals passionately and impulsively rather than by general rules of prudence the world would be an infinitely worse place than it is now to live in. The tender grace not of a day that is dead, but of a day yet to be born somehow, with the golden rule grown natural would be cut out from the perspective of our imaginations. The saints existing in this way may, with their extravagances of human tenderness be prophetic. Nay, innumerable times have proved themselves prophetic. Treating those whom they met in spite of the past, in spite of all appearances, as worthy, they have stimulated them to be worthy, miraculously transformed them by their radiant example and by the challenge of their expectation. From this point of view we may admit the human charity which we find in all saints and the great excess of it which we find in some saints to be genuinely creative social force. Tending to make real a degree of virtue which it alone is ready to assume as possible. The saints are authors, opteries, increases of goodness. The potentialities of development in human souls are unfathomable. So many who seemed irretrievably hardened have, in point of fact, been softened, converted, regenerated in ways that amazed the subjects even more than they surprised the spectators, that we never can be sure in advance of any man that his salvation, by the way of love, is hopeless. We have no right to speak of human crocodiles and boa constrictors as of fixedly incurable beings. We know not the complexities of personality, the smoldering of emotional fires, the other facets of the character of the holy hedron, the resources of the subliminal region. Saint Paul long ago made our ancestors familiar with the idea that every soul is virtually sacred. Since Christ died for us all without exception, Saint Paul said, we must despair of no one. This belief in the essential sacredness of everyone expresses itself today in all sorts of humane customs and reformatory institutions, and in a growing aversion to the death penalty and to brutality and punishment. The saints, with their extravagance of human tenderness, are the great torchbearers of this belief, the tip of the wedge, the clearers of the darkness. Like the single drops which sparkle in the sun as they are flung far ahead of the advancing edge of a wave crest or of a flood, they show the way and are forerunners. The world is not yet with them so they often seem in the midst of the world's affairs to be preposterous. Yet they are impregnators of the world, vivifiers and animators of potentialities of goodness which but for them would lie forever dormant. It is not possible to be quite as mean as we naturally are when they have passed before us. One fire kindles another, and without that overtrust in human worth which they show, the rest of us would lie in spiritual stagnancy. Momentarily considered then, the saint may waste his tenderness and be the dupe and victim of his charitable fever, but the general function of his charity in social evolution is vital and essential. If things are ever to move upward, someone must be ready to take the first step and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed. When they do succeed, they are far more powerfully successful than force or worldly prudence. Force destroys enemies and the best that can be said of prudence is that it keeps what we already have in safety. But non-resistance, when successful, turns enemies into friends and charity regenerates its objects. These saintly methods are, as I said, creative energies and genuine saints find in the elevated excitement with which their faith endows them and authority and impressiveness which makes them irresistible in situations where men of shallower nature cannot get on at all without the lack of worldly prudence. This practical proof that worldly wisdom may be safely transcended is the saint's magic gift to mankind. Footnote The best missionary lives abound in the victorious combination of non-resistance with personal authority. John G. Patton, for example, in the New Hebrides, among brutish Melanesian cannibals, preserves a charmed life by dint of it. When it comes to the point, no one ever dares actually to strike him. Native converts, inspired by him, showed analogous virtue. Quote One of our chiefs, full of the Christ Kindle desire to seek and to save, sent a message to an inland chief that he and four attendants would come on Sabbath and tell them the gospel of Jehovah God. The reply came back sternly forbidding their visit and threatening them with death any Christian that approached their village. Our chief sent in response a loving message telling them that Jehovah had taught the Christians to return good for evil and that they would come unarmed to tell them the story of how the Son of God came into the world and died in order to bless and save his enemies. The heathen chief sent back a stern and prompt reply once more, If you come, you will be killed. On Sabbath morn the Christian chief and his four companions were met outside the village by the heathen chief who implored and threatened them once more. But the former said We come to you without weapons of war. We come only to tell you about Jesus. We believe that you will protect us today. As they pressed steadily forward towards the village the spears began to be thrown at them. Some they evaded being all except one dexterous warriors and others they literally received with their bare hands and turned them aside in an incredible manner. The heathen apparently thunderstruck at these men thus approaching them without weapons of war and not even flinging back their own spears which they had caught. After having thrown what the old chief called a shower of spears desisted from mere surprise. Our Christian chief called out as he and his companions drew up in the midst of them on the village public ground. Jehovah thus protects us. He has given us all your spears. Once we would have thrown them back at you and killed you. But now we come to fight but to tell you about Jesus. He has changed our dark hearts. He asks you now to lay down all these your other weapons of war and to hear what we can tell you about the love of God our great father the only living God. The heathen were perfectly overawed. They manifestly looked on these Christians as protected by some invisible one. We live for the first time to the story of the gospel and of the cross. We lived to see that chief and all his tribe sitting in the school of Christ. And there is perhaps not an island in these southern seas amongst all those one for Christ where similar acts of heroism on the part of converts cannot be recited. Close quote. End footnote. This is vision of a better world consol us for the generally prevailing prose and barrenness. But even when on the whole we have to confess him ill-adapted he makes some converts and the environment gets better for his ministry. He is an effective ferment of goodness a slow transmuter of the earthly into a more heavenly order. In this respect the utopian dream of social justice many contemporary socialists and anarchists indulge are in spite of their impracticality and non-adaptation to present environmental conditions analogous to the saints belief in an existent kingdom of heaven. They help to break the edge of the general reign of hardness and are slow leavens of a better order. The next topic in order is asceticism to consider without argument a virtue liable to extravagance and excess. The optimism and refinement of the modern imagination has as I have already said elsewhere changed the attitude of the church towards corporeal mortification and a suso or a saint peter of Alcantara appear to us today rather in the light of tragic mount-a-banks than of sane men inspiring us with respect. Footnote. Saint Peter, Saint Teresa tells us in her autobiography quote, has passed forty years without ever sleeping more than an hour and a half a day of all his mortifications this was the one that had cost him the most to compass it heeked always on his knees or on his feet the little sleep he allowed nature to take was snatched in a sitting posture his head leaning against a piece of wood fixed in the wall even had he wished to lie down it would have been impossible because his cell was only four feet and a half long in the course of all these years he never raised his hood no matter what the ardor of the sun or the rain's strength he never put on a shoe he wore a garment of coarse sackcloth with nothing else upon his skin the garment was as scant as possible and over it a little cloak of the same stuff when the cold was great he took off the cloak and opened for a while the door and little window of his cell then he closed them and resumed the mantle this way, as he told us of warming himself and making his body feel a better temperature it was a frequent thing with him to eat once only for eight days and when I expressed my surprise he said that it was very easy if one once had acquired the habit one of his companions has assured me that he has gone sometimes eight days without food his poverty was extreme and his mortification even in his youth was such that he told me he had passed three years in a house of his order without knowing any of the monks the sound of their voice for he never raised his eyes and only found his way about by following the others he showed the same modesty on public highways he spent many years without ever laying eyes upon a woman but he confessed to me that at the age he had reached it was indifference to him whether he laid eyes on them or not he was very old when I first came to know him and his body so attenuated but it seemed formed of nothing so much as of so many roots of trees with all this sanctity he was very affable he never spoke unless he was questioned but his intellectual high-mindedness and grace gave to all his words an irresistible charm close quote end footnote if the inner dispositions are right we ask what need of all this torment is the connection of the outer nature it keeps the outer nature too important anyone who is genuinely emaciated from the flesh will look on pleasures and pains, abundance and privation as alike, irrelevant, and indifference he can engage in actions and experience enjoyments without fear of corruption or enslavement as the Bhagavad Gita says only those need renounce actions who are still inwardly attached thereto if one be really unattached to the fruits of action one may mix in the world with equanimity I quoted in a former lecture Saint Augustine's antinomian saying if you only love God enough you may safely follow all your inclinations he needs no devotional practices whose heart is moved to tears at the mere mention of the name of Hari is one of Ramakrishna's maxims and the Buddha in pointing out what he called the middle way to his disciples told them to abstain from both extremes excessive mortification being as unreal and unworthy as mere desire and pleasure the only perfect life he said was that of inner wisdom which makes one thing as indifferent to us as another to rest, to peace and to nirvana we find, accordingly that as ascetic saints have grown older and directors of conscience more experienced they usually have shown a tendency to lay less stress on special bodily mortifications Catholic teachers have always professed the rule that since health is needed for efficiency in God's service health must not be sacrificed for mortification the general optimism and healthy mindedness of liberal Protestant circles today makes mortification for mortification's sake repugnant to us we can no longer sympathize with cruel deities and the notion that God can take delight in the spectacle of sufferings self-inflicted in his honor is abhorrent in consequence of all these motives you probably are disposed of by a special utility can be shown in some individuals' discipline to treat the general tendency to asceticism as pathological yet I believe that a more careful consideration of the whole matter distinguishing between the general good intention of asceticism and the uselessness of some of the particular acts of which it may be guilty ought to rehabilitate it in our esteem for in its spiritual meaning asceticism stands for nothing less than for the essence of the twice-born philosophy it symbolizes lamely enough no doubt but sincerely the belief that there is an element of real wrongness in this world which is neither to be ignored nor evaded but which must be squarely met and overcome by an appeal to the soul's heroic resources and neutralized and cleansed away as against this view the ultra-optimistic form of the once-born philosophy thinks we may treat evil by the method of ignoring let a man who, by fortunate health and circumstances escapes the suffering of any great amount of evil in his own person also close his eyes to it as it exists in the wider universe outside his private experience and he will be quit of it altogether and can fail through life happily on a healthy-minded basis but we saw in our lectures on melancholy how precarious this attempt necessarily is moreover it is but for the individual and leaves the evil outside of him unredeemed and unprovided for in his philosophy no such attempt can be a general solution of the problem and to minds of somber tinge actually feel life as a tragic mystery such optimism is a shallow dodge or mean evasion it accepts, in lieu of a real deliverance what is a lucky personal accident merely a cranny to escape by it leaves the general world unhelped and still in the clutch of satan the real deliverance twice-born folk insist must be of universal application pain and wrong and death must be fairly met and overcome in higher excitement or else their sting remains essentially unbroken if one has ever taken the fact of the prevalence of tragic death in this world's history fairly into his mind freezing, drowning entombment alive wild beasts worse men and hideous diseases he can with difficulty seems to me continue his own career of worldly prosperity without suspecting that he may all the while not be really inside the game that he may lack the great initiation well, this is exactly what asceticism thinks and it voluntarily takes the initiation life is neither farce nor a gentile comedy it says but something we must sit at mourning garments hoping its bitter taste will purge us of our folly the wild and the heroic are indeed such rooted parts of it that healthy mindedness pure and simple with its sentimental optimism can hardly be regarded by any thinking man as a serious solution phrases of neatness coziness and comfort can never be an answer to the Sphinx's riddle these remarks I am leaning only upon mankind's common instinct for reality which in point of fact has always held the world to be essentially a theater for heroism in heroism we feel life's supreme mystery is hidden we tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it in any direction on the other hand no matter what a man's frailties otherwise may be willing to risk death and still more if he suffer it heroically in the service he has chosen the fact consecrates him forever inferior to ourselves in this or that way if yet we cling to life and he is able to fling it away like a flower as carrying nothing for it we account him in the deepest way our born superior each of us in his own person feels that a high-hearted indifference to life would expiate all his shortcomings the metaphysical mystery thus recognized by common sense that he who feeds on death that feeds on men possesses life super eminently and excellently and meets best the secret demands of the universe is the truth of which asceticism has been the faithful champion the folly of the cross so inexplicable by the intellect has yet its indestructible vital meaning representatively then and symbolically and apart from the vagaries into which the unenlightened intellect of former times may have let it wander asceticism must I believe be acknowledged to go with the profounder way of handling the gift of existence naturalistic optimism is mere syllabub and flattery and sponge cake in comparison the practical course of action for us as religious men would therefore it seems to me not be simply to turn our backs upon the ascetic impulse as most of us today turn them but rather to discover some outlet for it of which the fruits in the way of probation and hardship might be objectively useful the older monastic asceticism occupied itself with pathetic utilities or terminated in the mere egotism of the individual increasing his own perfection but is it not possible for us to discard most of these older forms of mortification and yet find saner channels for the heroism which inspired them does not for example the worship of material luxury and wealth which constitutes so large a portion of the spirit of our age makes somewhat for effeminacy and unmanliness is not the exclusively sympathetic and facetious way in which most children are brought up today so different from the education of a hundred years ago especially in evangelical circles in danger in spite of its many advantages of developing a certain trashiness of fiber are there not here about some points of application for a renovated and revised ascetic discipline many of you would recognize such dangers but would point to athletics militarism and individual and national enterprise and adventure as the remedies these contemporary ideals are quite as remarkable for the energy with which they make for heroic standards of life as contemporary religion is remarkable for the way in which it neglects them footnote I read in an American religious paper when a church has to be run by oysters ice cream and fun you may be sure that it is running away from Christ close quote such if one may judge by appearances is the present plight of many of our churches and footnote war and adventure assuredly keep all who engage in them from treating themselves too tenderly they demand such incredible efforts depth beyond depth of exertion both in degree and in duration that the whole scale of motivation alters discomfort and annoyance hunger and wet pain and cold squalor and filth cease to have any deterrent operation whatever death turns into a common place matter and its usual power to check our action vanishes with the annulling of these customary inhibitions ranges of new energy are set free and life seems cast upon a higher plane of power the beauty of war in this respect is that it is so congruous with ordinary human nature ancestral evolution has made us all potential warriors so the most insignificant individual when thrown into an army in the field is weaned from whatever excess of tenderness toward his precious person he may bring with him and may easily develop into a monster of insensibility but when we compare the military type of self severity with that of the ascetic saint we find a worldwide difference in all their spiritual concomitance a clear headed Austrian officer writes quote live and let live is no device for an army contempt for one's own comrades for the troops of the enemy and above all fierce contempt for one's own person are what war demands of everyone far better is it for an army to be too savage, too cruel too barbarous than to possess too much sentimentality and human reasonableness if the soldier is to be good for anything as a soldier he must be exactly the opposite of a reasoning and thinking man the measure of goodness in him is his possible use in war war and even peace require of the soldier absolutely peculiar standards of morality the recruit brings with him common moral notions of which he must seek immediately to get rid for him victory success must be everything the most barbaric tendencies and men come to life again in war and for war's uses they are incommensurably good close quote these words are of course literally true the immediate aim of the soldier's life is as Moltke said destruction and nothing but destruction and whatever constructions wars result in are remote and non military consequently the soldier cannot train himself to be too feeling less to all those sympathies and respects whether for persons or for things that make for conservation yet the fact remains that war is a school of strenuous life and heroism and being in the line of aboriginal instinct is the only school that as yet is universally available but when we gravely ask ourselves whether this wholesale organization of irrationality and crime be our only bulwark against effeminacy we stand aghast at the thought and think more kindly of ascetic religion one hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat what we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible I have often thought that in the old monkish poverty worship in spite of the pedantry which infested it there might be something like a moral equivalent of war which we are seeking may not voluntarily accepted poverty be the strenuous life without the need of crushing weaker peoples poverty indeed is the strenuous life without or uniforms or hysteric popular applause or lies or circumlocutions and when one sees the way in which wealth getting enters as an ideal into the very bone and marrow of our generation one wonders whether a revival of the belief that poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be the transformation of military courage and the spiritual reform which our time stands most in need of among us English speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung we have grown literally afraid to be poor we despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life if he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money making street we deem him spiritless and lacking an ambition we have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant the liberation from material attachments the unbribed soul the manlier indifference the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly the more athletic trim in short the moral fighting shape when we of the so called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank account and doomed to manual labor it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion it is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen but wealth does this only in a portion of the actual cases elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption there are thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth bound man must be a slave will stay man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a free man think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to unpopular causes we need no longer hold our tongues or fear to vote the revolutionary or reformatory ticket our stocks might fall our hopes of promotion vanish our salaries stop our club doors close in our faces yet while we lived we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit and our example would help to set free our generation the cause would need its funds but we its servants would be potent in proportion as we personally were contented with our poverty I recommend this matter to your serious pondering for it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers I have now said all that I can usefully say about the several fruits of religion as they are manifested in saintly lives so I will make a brief review and pass to my more general conclusions our question you will remember is as to whether religion stands approved by its fruits as these are exhibited in the saintly type of character single attributes of saintliness may it is true be temperamental endowments found in non-religious individuals but the whole group of them forms a combination which as such is religious for it seems to flow from the sense of the divine as from its psychological center whoever possesses strongly this sense comes naturally to think that the smallest details of this world derive infinite significance from their relation to an unseen divine order the thought of this order yields him a superior denomination of happiness and a steadfastness of soul with which no other can compare in social relations his serviceability is exemplary he abounds in impulses to help his help is inward as well as outward for his sympathy reaches souls as well as bodies and kindles unsuspected faculties therein instead of placing happiness where common men place it in comfort he places it in a higher kind of inner excitement which converts discomforts into sources of cheer and annulls unhappiness so he turns his back upon no duty however thankless as we are in need of assistance we can count upon the saint lending his hand with more certainty than we can count upon any other person finally his humble mindedness and his ascetic tendencies save him from the petty personal pretensions which so obstruct our ordinary social intercourse and his purity gives us in him a clean man for a companion felicity, purity, charity patience, self-severity these are splendid excellencies and the saint of all men shows them in the completest possible measure but as we saw all these things together do not make saints infallible when their intellectual outlook is narrow they fall into all sorts of holy excesses, fanaticism or theopathic absorption self-torment, prudery scrupulosity, gullibility and morbid inability to meet the world by the very intensity of his fidelity to the paltry ideals with which an inferior intellect may inspire him a saint can be even more objectionable and damnable than a superficial carnal man would be in the same situation we must judge him not sentimentally only and not in isolation but using our own intellectual standards placing him in his environment and estimating his total function now in the matter of intellectual standards we must bear in mind that it is unfair where we find narrowness of mind always to impute it as a vice to the individual for in religious and theological matters he probably absorbs his narrowness from his generation moreover we must not found the essentials of saintliness which are those general passions of which I have spoken with its accidents which are the special determinations of these passions at any historical moment in these determinations the saints will usually be loyal to their temporary idols of their tribe taking refuge in monasteries was as much an idol of the tribe in the middle ages as bearing a hand in the world's today saint Francis or saint Bernard were they living today would undoubtedly be leading consecrated lives of some sort but quite as undoubtedly they would not lead them in retirement our animosity to special historic manifestations must not lead us to give away the saintly impulses in their essential nature to the tender mercies of inimical critics the most inimical critic of the saintly impulses whom I know is Nietzsche he contrasts them with the worldly passions as we find these embodied in the predacious military character all together to the advantage of the latter your born saint it must be confessed has something about him which often makes the gorge of a carnal man rise so it will be worthwhile to consider the contrast in question more fully dislike of the saintly nature seems to be a negative result of the biologically useful instinct of welcoming leadership and glorifying the chief of the tribe the chief is the potential if not the actual tyrant the masterful overpowering man of prey we confess our inferiority and grovel before him we quail under his glance and are at the same time proud of owning so dangerous a lord such instinctive and submissive hero worship must have been indispensable in primeval tribal life in the endless wars of those times leaders were absolutely needed for the tribe's survival if there were any tribes who owned no leaders they can have left no issue to narrate their doom to their consciences for conscience in them coalesced with will and those who looked on their face were as much smitten with wonder at their freedom from inner restraint as with awe at the energy of their outward performances compared with these beaked and taloned graspers of the world saints are herbivorous animals tame and harmless barnyard poultry there are saints whose beard you may ever care to pull with impunity such a man excites no thrills of wonder veiled in terror his conscience is full of scruples and returns he stuns us neither by his inward freedom nor his outward power and unless he found within us an altogether different faculty of admiration to appeal to we should pass him by with contempt in point of fact does appeal to a different faculty reenacted in human nature is the fable of the wind the sun and the traveler the woman loves the man the more admiringly the stormier he shows himself and the world deifies its rulers the more for being willful and unaccountable but the woman in turn subjugates the man by the mystery of gentleness and beauty man kind is susceptible and suggestible in opposite directions and the rivalry of influences is unsleeping the saintly and the worldly ideal pursue their feud in literature as much as in real life for Nietzsche the saint represents little but sneakingness and slavishness he is the sophisticated invalid the degenerate par excellence the man of insufficient vitality his prevalence would put the human type in danger quote the sick are the greatest danger for the well the weaker not the stronger are the strong's undoing it is not fear of our fellow man which we should wish to see diminished but fear rouses those who are strong to become terrible in turn themselves and preserves the hard-earned and successful type of humanity what is to be dreaded by us more than any other doom is not fear but rather the great disgust not fear but rather the great pity disgust and pity for our human fellows the morbid are our greatest peril not the bad men not the predatory beings those born wrong the broken they it is the weakest who are undermining the vitality of the race poisoning our trust in life and putting humanity in question every look of them is a sigh would I were something other I am sick and tired of what I am in this swapsoil of self-contempt every poisonous weed flourishes and all so small so secret so dishonest and so sweetly rotten here swarm the worms of sensitiveness and resentment here the air smells odious with secrecy with what is not to be acknowledged here is woven endlessly the net of the meanest of conspiracies the conspiracy of those who suffer against those who succeed and are victorious here the very aspect of the victorious is hated as if hell success strength pride and the sense of power were in themselves things vicious for which one ought eventually to make bitter expiation oh how these people would themselves like to inflict the expiation how they thirst to be the hangman and all the while their duplicity never confesses their hatred to be hatred close quote this antipathy is itself sickly enough but we all know what he means and he expresses well the clash between the two ideals the carnivorous minded strong man the adult male and cannibal can see nothing but moldiness and morbidness in the saints gentleness and self-severity and regards him with pure loathing the whole feud revolves essentially upon two pivots for the unseen world be our chief sphere of adaptation and must our means of adaptation in this seen world be aggressiveness or non-resistance the debate is serious in some sense and to some degree both worlds must be acknowledged and taken account of and in the seen world both aggressiveness and non-resistance are needful it is a question of emphasis more or less is the saints type or the strong man's type the more ideal it has often been supposed and even now I think it is supposed by most persons that there can be one intrinsically ideal type of human character a certain kind of man it is imagined must be the best man absolutely and apart from the utility of his function apart from economical considerations the saints type and the knights or gentlemen's type have always been rival claimants of this absolute ideality and in the ideal of military religious orders both types were in a manner blended according to the empirical philosophy however all ideals are matters of relation it would be absurd for example to ask for a definition of the ideal of a horse so long as dragging drays and running races bearing children and jogging about with tradesmen's packages all remain as indispensable differentiations of equine function you may take what you call a general all around animal as a compromise but he will be inferior to any horse of a more specialized type in some one particular direction we must not forget this now in discussing saintliness we ask if it be an ideal type of manhood we must test it by its economical relations I think that the method which Mr. Spencer uses in his data of ethics will help to fix our opinion ideality and conduct is altogether a matter of adaptation a society where all were invariably aggressive would destroy itself by interfraction and in a society where some are aggressive others must be non-resistant if there is to be any kind of order this is the present constitution of society and to the mixture we owe many of our blessings but the aggressive members of society are always tending to become bullies, robbers and swindlers and no one believes that such a state of things as we now live in is the millennium it is meanwhile quite possible to conceive an imaginary society in which there should be no aggressiveness but only sympathy and fairness any small community of true friends now realizes such a society abstractly considered such a society on a large scale would be the millennium for every good thing might be realized there with no expense of friction to such a millennial society the saint would be entirely adapted his peaceful modes of appeal would be efficacious over his companions and there would be no one extent to take advantage of his non-resistance the saint is therefore abstractly a higher type of man than the strong man because he is adapted to the highest society conceivable whether that society ever be concretely possible or not the strong man would immediately tend by his presence to make that society deteriorate it would become inferior in everything saved in a certain kind of bellicose excitement dear to men as they are now but if we turn from the abstract question to the actual situation we find that the individual saint may be well or ill adapted according to particular circumstances there is in short no absoluteness in the excellence of sainthood it must be confessed that as far as this world goes anyone who makes an out and out saint of himself does so at his peril if he is not a large enough man he may appear more insignificant and contemptible for all his saintship then if he had remained a worldling footnote we all know daft saints and they inspire a queer kind of aversion but in comparing saints with strong men we must choose individuals on the same intellectual level the underwitted strong man homologous in his sphere with the underwitted saint is the bully of the slums the hooligan or rowdy surely on this level also the saint preserves a certain superiority end footnote accordingly religion has seldom been so radically taken in our western world that the devotee could not mix it with some worldly temper it has always found good men who could follow most of its impulses but who stopped short when it came to non-resistance Christ himself was fierce upon occasion Cromwell's, Stonewell Jackson's Gordon's show that Christians can be strong men also how is success to be absolutely measured when there are so many environments and so many ways of looking at the adaptation it cannot be measured absolutely the verdict will vary according to the point of view adopted from the biological point of view Saint Paul was a failure because he was beheaded yet he was magnificently adapted to the larger environment and so far as any saint's example is a leaven of righteousness in the world and draws it in the direction of more prevalent habits of saintliness he is a success no matter what his immediate bad fortune may be the greatest saints the spiritual heroes whom everyone acknowledges the Francis's, Bernard's Luther's, Loyola's, Wesley's Channing's, Moody's the Phillips Brooks's the Agnes Jones's Margaret Hallehan's and Dora Patterson's are successes from the outset they show themselves that there is no question everyone perceives their strength and stature their sense of mystery in things their passion, their goodness irradiate about them and enlarge their outlines while they soften them with an atmosphere and background and placed alongside of them the strong men of this world and no other seem as dry as sticks as hard and crude as blocks of stone or brick bats in a general way then and on the whole our abandonment of theological criteria and our testing of religion by practical common sense and the empirical method leave it in possession of a towering place in history economically the saintly group of qualities is indispensable to the world's welfare the great saints are immediate successes the smaller ones are at least heralds and harbingers and they may be leavens also of a better mundane order let us be saints then if we can whether or not we succeed visibly and temporally there are many mansions and each of us must discover for himself the kind of religion and the amount of saintship which best comports with what he believes to be his powers and feels to be his truest mission and vocation there are no successes to be guaranteed and no set orders to be given to individuals so long as we follow the methods of empirical philosophy this is my conclusion so far I know that on some of your minds it leaves a feeling of wonder that such a method should have been applied to such a subject and this in spite of all those remarks about empiricism which I made at the beginning of lecture 13 how you say can religion which believes in two worlds and an invisible order be estimated by the adaptation of its fruits to this world's order alone it is its truth not its utility you insist upon which our verdict ought to depend if religion is true its fruits are good fruits even though in this world they should prove uniformly ill adapted and full of not but pathos it goes back then after all to the question of the truth of theology the plot inevitably thickens upon us we cannot escape theoretical considerations I propose then that to some degree we face the responsibility religious persons have often though not uniformly professed to see truth in a special manner that manner is known as mysticism I will consequently now proceed to treat at some link the mystical phenomena and after that though more briefly religious philosophy end of lecture 15