 Lecture 19 of the Varieties of Religious Experience We have wound our way back, after our excursion through mysticism and philosophy, to where we were before. The uses of religion, its uses to the individual who has it, and the uses of the individual himself to the world, are the best arguments that truth is in it. We return to the empirical philosophy. The true is what works well, even though the qualification on the whole may always have to be added. In this lecture we must revert to description again, and finish our picture of the religious consciousness by a word about some of its other characteristic elements. Then, in a final lecture, we shall be free to make a general review and draw our independent conclusions. The first point I will speak of is the part which the aesthetic life plays in determining one's choice of a religion. Men, I said a while ago, involuntarily intellectualize their religious experience. They need formulas, just as they need fellowship and worship. I spoke, therefore, too contemptuously of the pragmatic uselessness of the famous scholastic list of attributes of the deity, for they have one use which I neglected to consider. The eloquent passage in which Numen enumerates them puts us on the track of it. Intoning them as he would in tone a cathedral service, he shows how high is their aesthetic value. It enriches our bare piety to carry these exalted and mysterious verbal additions just as it enriches a church to have an organ and old brasses, marbles and frescoes and stained windows. Epithets lend an atmosphere and overtones to our devotion. They are like a hymn of praise and service of glory, and may sound the more sublime for being incomprehensible. Mines, like Numen's, grow as jealous of their credit, as he them priests are of that of the jewelry and ornaments that blaze upon their idols. Numen's imagination so innately craved an ecclesiastical system that he can write. From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion. I know no other religion. I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion. Close quote, and again, speaking of himself about the age of thirty, he writes, quote, I loved to act as feeling myself in my bishop's sight as if it were the sight of God. Close quote, end footnote. Among the buildings out of religion, which the mind spontaneously indulges in, the aesthetic motive must never be forgotten. I promised to say nothing of ecclesiastical systems in these lectures. I may be allowed, however, to put in a word at this point on the way in which their satisfaction of certain aesthetic needs contributes to their hold on human nature. Although some persons aim most at intellectual purity and simplification, for others, richness is the supreme imaginative requirement. Footnote. The intellectual difference is quite on a par in practical importance with the analogous difference in character. We saw, under the head of saintliness, how some characters resent confusion and must live in purity, consistency, simplicity. For others, on the contrary, superabundance, overpressure, stimulation, amounts of superficial relations are indispensable. There are men who would suffer a very syncope if you should pay all their debts. Bring it about that their engagements had been kept, their letters answered, their perplexities relieved, and their duties fulfilled, down to one which lay on a clean table under their eyes with nothing to interfere with its immediate performance. A day stripped so steringly bare would be for them appalling. So with ease, elegance, tributes of affections, social recognitions, some of us require amounts of these things which to others would appear a mass of lying and sophistication. And footnote. When one's mind is strongly of this type, an individual religion will hardly serve the purpose. The inner need is rather of something institutional and complex, majestic in the hierarchic interrelatedness of its parts, with authority descending from stage to stage, and at every stage, objects for adjectives of mystery and splendor, derived in the last resort from the Godhead who is the fountain and culmination of the system. One feels, then, as if in presence of some vast encrusted work of jewelry or architecture. One hears the multitudinous liturgical appeal. One gets the honorific vibration coming from every quarter. Compared with such a noble complexity in which ascending and descending movements seem in no way to jar upon stability, in which no single item, however humble, is insignificant, because so many august institutions hold it in its place, how flat does evangelical Protestantism appear, how bare the atmosphere of those isolated religious lives whose boast it is that man in the bush with God may meet. What a pulverization and leveling of what a glorious piled-up structure. To an imagination used to the perspectives of dignity and glory, the naked gospel scheme seems to offer an almshouse for a palace. It is much like the patriotic sentiment of those brought up in ancient empires. How many emotions must be frustrated of their object when one gives up the titles of dignity, the crimson lights and blare of brass, the gold embroidery, the plumed troops, the fear and trembling, and puts up with a president in a black coat who shakes hands with you and comes, it may be, from a home upon a belt or prairie with one sitting-room and a Bible in its center table. It properizes the monarchial imagination. The strength of these aesthetic sentiments make it rigorously impossible, it seems to me, that Protestantism, however superior in spiritual profundity it may be to Catholicism, should, at the present day, succeed in making many converts from the more venerable ecclesiasticism. The latter offers a so much richer pastorage and shade to the fancy, has so many cells with so many different kinds of honey, is so indulgent in its multi-form appeals to human nature that Protestantism will always show to Catholic eyes the almshouse physiognomy. The bitter negativity of it is, to the Catholic mind, incomprehensible. To intellectual Catholics, many of the antiquated beliefs and practices to which the Church gives countenance are, if taken literally, as childish as they are to Protestants, but they are childish in the pleasing sense of childlike, innocent and amiable, and worthy to be smiled on in consideration of the undeveloped condition of the dear people's intellects. To the Protestant, on the contrary, they are childish in the sense of being idiotic falsehoods. He must stamp out their delicate and lovable redundancy, leaving the Catholic to shudder at his literalness. He appears to the latter as morose as if he were some hard-eyed, numb, monotonous kind of reptile. The two will never understand each other. Their centers of emotional energy are too different. Rigorous truth and human nature's intricacies are always in need of a mutual interpreter. Footnote. Compare the informality of Protestantism, where the meek lover of the good, along with his God, visits the sick, etc., for their own sakes, with the elaborate business that goes on in Catholic devotion, and carries with it the social excitement of all more complex businesses. An essentially worldly-minded Catholic woman can become a visit of the sick on purely coquettish principles, with her confessor and director, her merits storing up, her patron saints, her privileged relation to the Almighty, drawing his attention as a professional devotee, her definite exercises, and her definitely recognized social pose in the organization. And footnote. So much for the aesthetic diversities in the religious consciousness. In most books on religion, three things are represented as its most essential elements. These are sacrifice, confession, and prayer. I must say a word in turn of each of these elements, though briefly. First, of sacrifice. Sacrifice to gods are omnipresent in primeval worship, but, as cults have grown refined, art offerings and the blood of he goats have been superseded by sacrifices more spiritual in their nature. Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism get along without ritual sacrifice, so does Christianity save insofar as the notion is preserved in transfigured form in the mystery of Christ's atonement. These religions substitute offerings of the heart, renunciations of the inner self for all those vane ablations. In the ascetic practices which Islam, Buddhism, and the older Christianity encourage, we see how indestructible is the idea that sacrifice of some sort is a religious exercise. In lecturing on asceticism, I spoke of its significance as symbolic of the sacrifices which life, whenever it is taken strenuously, calls for. But as I said my say about those, and as these lectures expressly avoid earlier religious usages and questions of derivation, I will pass from the subject of sacrifice altogether and turn to that of confession. In regard to confession, I will also be most brief, saying my word about it psychologically, not historically. Not nearly as widespread a sacrifice, it corresponds to a more inward and moral stage of sentiment. It is part of the general system of purgation and cleansing which one feels oneself in need of, in order to be in right relations to one's deity. For him who confesses, shams are over and realities have begun, he has exteriorized his rottenness. If he has not actually got rid of it, he at least no longer smears it over with a hypocritical show of virtue. He lives at least upon a basis of veracity. The complete decay of the practice of confession in Anglo-Saxon communities is a little hard to account for. Reaction against popery is, of course, the historic explanation, for in popery confession went with penances and absolution and other inadmissible practices. But on the side of the sinner himself, it seems as if the need ought to have been too great to accept so summary a refusal of its satisfaction. One would think that in more men the shell of secrecy would have had to open, the pent-in abscess to burst and gain relief even though the ear that heard the confession were unworthy. The Catholic Church, for obvious utilitarian reasons, has substituted oracular confession to one priest for the more radical act of public confession. We English-speaking protestants in the general self-reliance and unsociability of our nature seem to find it enough if we take God alone into our confidence. The next topic on which I must comment is prayer, and this time it must be less briefly. We have heard much talk of late against prayer, especially against prayers for better weather and for the recovery of sick people. As regards prayers for the sick, if any medical fact can be considered to stand firm, it is that in certain environments prayer may contribute to recovery and should be encouraged as a therapeutic measure. Being a normal factor of moral health in the person, its omission would be deleterious. The case of the weather is different. Notwithstanding the recency of the opposite belief, everyone now knows that droughts and storms follow from physical antecedents, and that moral appeals cannot avert them. Footnote. Example. Quote, the minister at Sudbury, being at the Thursday lecture in Boston, heard the officiating clergyman praying for rain. As soon as the service was over, he went to the petitioner and said, You Boston ministers, as soon as a tulip wilts under your windows, go to church and pray for rain until all Concord and Sudbury are under water. Quote, end footnote. But petitioner prayer is only one department of prayer, and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched. Prayer, in this wide sense, is the very soul and essence of religion. Says a liberal French theologian. Quote, religion is an intercourse, a conscious and voluntary relation, entered into by a soul in distress, with a mysterious power upon which it feels itself to depend, and upon which its fate is contingent. This intercourse with God is realized by prayer. Prayer is religion in act, that is, prayer is real religion. It is prayer that distinguishes the religious phenomenon from such similar or neighboring phenomena as purely moral or aesthetic sentiment. Religion is nothing if it be not the vital act by which the entire mind seeks to save itself by clinging to the principle from which it draws its life. This act is prayer by which term I understand no vain exercise of words, no mere repetition of certain sacred formulae, but the very movement itself of the soul, putting itself in a personal relation of contact with the mysterious power of which it feels the presence. It may be even before it has a name by which to call it. Wherever this interior prayer is lacking there is no religion. Wherever, on the other hand, this prayer rises and stirs the soul, even in the absence of forms or of doctrines, we have living religion. One sees from this why natural religion, so called, is not properly a religion. It cuts man off from prayer. It leaves him and God in mutual remoteness with no intimate commerce, no interior dialogue, no interchange, no action of God in man, no return of man to God. At bottom this pretended religion is only a philosophy. Born at epochs of rationalism, of critical investigations, it never was anything but an abstraction, an artificial and dead creation. It reveals to its examiner hardly one of the characters proper to religion. It seems to me that the entire series of our lectures proves the truth of M. Sabetier's contention. The religious phenomenon, studied as an inner fact and apart from ecclesiastical or theological complications, has shown itself to consist everywhere and at all its stages in the consciousness which individuals have of an intercourse between themselves and higher powers with which they feel themselves to be related. This intercourse is realized at the time as being both active and mutual. If it be not effective, if it be not a give and take relation, if nothing be really transacted while it lasts, if the world is in no way different for its having taken place, then prayer, taken in this wide meaning of a sense that something is transacting, is of course a feeling of what is illusory, and religion must on the whole be classed, not simply as containing elements of delusion. These undoubtedly everywhere exist, but as being rooted in delusion altogether, just as materialists and atheists have always said it was. At most there might remain, when the direct experiences of prayer were ruled out as false witnesses, some inferential belief that the whole order of existence must have a divine cause. But this way of contemplating nature, pleasing as it would doubtless be to persons of a pious taste, would leave to them but the spectator's part at a play. Whereas in experimental religion and the prayerful life, we seem ourselves to be actors, not in a play, but in a very serious reality. The genuineness of religion is thus indissolubly bound up with the question whether the prayerful consciousness be or not be deceitful. The conviction that something is genuinely transacted in this consciousness is the very core of a living religion. As to what is transacted, great differences of opinion have prevailed. The unseen powers have been supposed, and are yet supposed, to do things which no enlightened man can nowadays believe in. It may well prove that the sphere of influence in prayer is subjective exclusively, and that what is immediately changed is only the mind of the praying person. But however our opinion of prayer's effects may come to be limited by criticism, religion, in the vital sense in which these lectures study it, must stand or fall by the persuasion that effects of some sort genuinely do occur. Through prayer, religion insists, things which cannot be realized in any other manner come about. Energy, which but for prayer would be bound, is by prayer set free and operates in some part, be it objective or subjective, of the world of facts. This postulate is strikingly expressed in a letter written by the late Frederick W. H. Myers to a friend who allows me to quote from it. It shows how independent the prayer instinct is of usual doctrine complications. Mr. Myers writes, quote, I am glad that you have asked me about prayer because I have rather strong ideas on the subject. First, consider what are the facts. There exists around us a spiritual universe, and that universe is an actual relation with the material. Around the spiritual universe comes the energy which maintains the material, the energy which makes the life of each individual spirit. Our spirits are supported by a perpetual indrawal of this energy, and the vigor of that indrawal is perpetually changing, much as the vigor of our absorption of material nutriment changes from hour to hour. I call these facts, because I think that some scheme of this kind is the only one consistent with our actual evidence. Too complex to summarize here. How then should we act on these facts? Plainly we must endeavor to draw in as much spiritual life as possible, and we must place our minds in any attitude which experience shows to be favorable to such indrawal. Prayer is the general name for that attitude of open and earnest expectancy. If we then ask to whom to pray, the answer, strangely enough, must be that that does not much matter. The prayer is not indeed a purely subjective thing. It means a real increase in intensity of absorption of spiritual power or grace. But we do not know enough of what takes place in the spiritual world to know how the prayer operates, who is cognizant of it, or through what channel the grace is given. Better let children pray to Christ, who is at any rate the highest individual spirit of whom we have any knowledge. But it would be rash to say that Christ himself hears us, while to say that God hears us is merely to restate the first principle, that grace flows in from the infinite spiritual world. Close quote. Let us reserve the question of the truth or falsehood of the belief that power is absorbed until the next lecture, when our dogmatic conclusions, if we have any, must be reached. Let this lecture still confine itself to the description of the phenomena, and as a concrete example of an extreme sort, of the way in which the prayerful life may still be led. Let me take a case with which most of you must be acquainted, that of George Mueller of Bristol, who died in 1898. Mueller's prayers were of the crassest petitional order. Early in life he resolved on taking certain Bible promises in literal sincerity, and on letting himself be fed, not by his own worldly foresight, but by the Lord's hand. He had an extraordinarily active and successful career, among the fruits of which were the distribution of over two million copies of the Scripture text in different languages. The equipment of several hundred missionaries. The circulation of more than a hundred and eleven million of scriptural books, pamphlets and tracts. The building of five large orphanages, and the keeping and educating of thousands of orphans. Finally, the establishment of schools in which over a hundred and twenty-one thousand youthful and adult pupils were taught. In the course of this work, Mr. Mueller received and administered nearly a million and a half pound sterling, and traveled over two hundred thousand miles of sea and land. During the sixty-eight years of his ministry he never owned any property except his clothes and furniture, and cash in hand, and he left, at the age of eighty-six, an estate worth only a hundred and sixty pounds. His method was to let his general wants be publicly known, but not to acquaint other people with the details of his temporary necessities. For the relief of the latter he prayed directly to the Lord, believing that sooner or later prayers are always answered if one have trust enough. He writes, quote, If I lose such a thing as a key I ask the Lord to direct me to it, and I look for an answer to my prayer. When a person with whom I have made an appointment does not come, according to the fixed time, and I begin to be inconvenienced by it, I ask the Lord to be pleased to hasten him to me, and I look for an answer. When I do not understand a passage of the word of God I lift up my heart to the Lord that he would be pleased by his Holy Spirit to instruct me, and I expect to be taught, though I do not fix the time when, and the manner how it should be. When I am going to minister in the word I seek help from the Lord, and am not cast down, but of good cheer, because I look for his assistance. Close, quote, Mueller's custom was to never run up bills, not even for a week. Quote, As the Lord deals out to us by the day, the week's payment might become due, and we have no money to meet it, and thus those with whom we deal might be inconvenienced by us, and we be found acting against the commandment of the Lord, oh no man anything. From this day and henceforward, whilst the Lord gives to us our supplies by the day, we propose to pay at once for every article as it is purchased, and never to buy anything except we can pay for it at once. However much may seem to be needed, and however much those with whom we deal may wish to be paid only by the week. Close, quote. The articles needed, of which Mueller speaks, were the food, fuel, etc., of his orphanages. Somehow, near as they often come to going without a meal, they hardly ever seem actually to have done so. Quote, Greater and more manifest nearness of the Lord's presence I have never had than when after breakfast there were no means for dinner for more than a hundred persons, or when after dinner there were no means for the tea, and yet the Lord provided the tea, and all this without one single human being having been informed about our need. Through grace my mind is so fully assured of the faithfulness of the Lord that in the midst of the greatest need I am enabled in peace to go about my other work. Indeed, did not the Lord give me this, which is the result of trusting in him, I should scarcely be able to work at all, for it is now comparatively a rare thing that a day comes when I am not in need for one or another part of the work. Close, quote. In building his orphanages simply by prayer and faith, Mueller affirms that his primotive was, quote, to have something to point to as a visible proof that our God and Father is the same faithful God that he ever was, as willing as ever to prove himself the living God in our day as formerly to all that put their trust in him. Close, quote. For this reason he refused to borrow money for any of his enterprises, quote. How does it work when we thus anticipate God by going our own way? We certainly weaken faith instead of increasing it, and each time we work thus a deliverance of our own we find it more and more difficult to trust in God, till at last we give way entirely to our natural fallen reason and unbelief prevails. How different if one is enabled to wait God's own time and to look alone to him for help and deliverance. When at last help comes, after many seasons of prayer it may be how sweet it is and what a present recompense. Dear Christian reader, if you have never walked in this path of obedience before, do so now, and you will then know experimentally the sweetness of the joy which results from it. Close, quote. When the supplies came in, but slowly, Mueller always considered that this was for the trial of his faith and patience. When his faith and patience had been sufficiently tried, the Lord would send more means. I, quote from his diary, quote, and thus it proved for today was given me the sum of two thousand fifty pounds, of which two thousand are for the building fund of a certain house, and fifty for present necessities. It is impossible to describe my joy in God when I received this donation. I was neither excited nor surprised, for I look out for answers to my prayers. I believe that God hears me. Yet my heart was so full of joy that I could only sit before God and admire him, like David in 2 Samuel chapter 7. At last I cast myself flat down upon my face, and burst forth in thanksgiving to God and in surrendering my heart afresh to him for his blessed service. Close, quote. George Mueller's is a case extreme in every respect, and in no respect more so than in the extraordinary narrowness of the man's intellectual horizon. His God was, as he often said, his business partner. He seems to have been, for Mueller, little more than a sort of supernatural clergyman interested in the congregation of tradesmen and others in Bristol who were his saints, and in the orphanages and other enterprises, but unpossessed of any of those vaster and wilder and more ideal attributes with which the human imagination elsewhere has invested him. Mueller, in short, was absolutely unphilosophical. His intensely private and practical conception of his relations with the deity continued the traditions of the most primitive human thought. Footnote. I cannot resist the temptation of quoting an expression of an even more primitive style of religious thought, which I find in Arbor's English garland. Robert Lide, an English sailor, along with an English boy, being prisoners on a French ship in 1689, set upon the crew of seven Frenchmen, killed two, made the other five prisoners, and brought home the ship. Lide thus describes how in this feat he found his God a very present help in time of trouble. With the assistance of God I kept my feet where they three and one more did strive to throw me down. Feeling the Frenchman, which hung about my middle, hang very heavy, I said to the boy, go round the binocle and knock down that man that hangeth on my back. So the boy did strike him one blow on the head which made him fall. Then I looked about for a Marlin spike or anything else to strike them with all. But seeing nothing, I said, Lord, what shall I do? Then casting up my eye upon my left side and seeing a Marlin spike hanging, I jerked my right arm and took hold, and struck the point four times about a quarter of an inch deep into the skull of that man that had hold of my left arm. One of the Frenchmen then hauled the Marlin spike away from him. But through God's wonderful providence it either fell out of his hand or else he threw it down, and at this time the Almighty God gave me strength enough to take one man in one hand and throw at the other's head, and looking about again to see anything to strike them with all, but seeing nothing, I said, Lord, what shall I do now? And then it pleased God to put me in mind of my knife in my pocket. And although two of the men had hold of my right arm, yet God Almighty strengthened me so that I put my right hand into my right pocket, drew out the knife and she put it between my legs and drew it out, and then cut the man's throat with it that had his back to my breast, and he immediately dropped down and scarce ever stirred after. Close quote. I have slightly abridged Lide's narrative. End footnote. When we compare a mind like his with such a mind as, for example, Emerson's or Philip's Brooks's, we see the range which the religious consciousness covers. There is an immense literature relating to answers to petitional prayer. The evangelical journals are filled with such answers and books are devoted to the subject, but for us, Mueller's case will suffice. A less sturdy beggar-like fashion of leading the prayerful life is followed by innumerable other Christians. Persistence in leaning on the Almighty for support and guidance will, such persons say, bring with it proofs, palpable but much more subtle of his presence and active influence. The following description of a lead life by a German writer whom I have already quoted, would no doubt appear to countless Christians in every country as if transcribed from their own personal experience. One finds in this guided sort of life says Dr. Hilty quote, that books and words and sometimes people come to one's cognizance just at the very moment in which one needs them. That one glides over great dangers as if with shut eyes, remaining ignorant of what would have terrified one or led one astray until the peril is past. This being especially the case with temptations to vanity and sensuality. That paths on which one ought not to wander are, as it were, hedged off with thorns. But that on the other side great obstacles are suddenly removed. That when the time has come for something, one suddenly receives a courage that formerly failed, or perceives the root of a matter that until then was concealed, or discovers thoughts, talents, yay, even pieces of knowledge and insight in oneself, of which it is impossible to say whence they came. Finally, that persons help us or decline to help us, favor us or refuse us as if they had to do so against their will. So that often those indifferent or even unfriendly to us yield us the greatest service and furtherance. God takes often their worldly goods from those whom he leads at just the right moment when they threaten to impede the effort after higher interests. Besides all this, other noteworthy things come to pass, of which it is not easy to give account. There is no doubt whatever that now one walks continually through open doors and on the easiest roads with as little care and trouble as it is possible to imagine. Furthermore, one finds oneself settling one's affairs neither too early nor too late, whereas they were want to be spoiled by untimeliness, even when the preparations had been well laid. In addition to this, one does them with perfect tranquility of mind, almost as if they were matters of no consequence, like errands done by us for another person, in which case we usually act more calmly than when we act in our own concerns. Again, one finds that one can wait for everything patiently, and that is one of life's great arts. One finds also that each thing comes duly, one thing after the other, so that one gains time to make one's footing sure before advancing farther. And then everything occurs to us at the right moment, just what we ought to do, etc., and often in a very striking way, just as if a third person were keeping watch over those things which we are in easy danger of forgetting. Often, too, persons are sent to us at the right time to offer or ask for what is needed and what we should never have had the courage or resolution to undertake of our own accord. Through all these experiences, one finds that one is kindly and tolerant of other people, even of such as our repulsive, negligent, or ill-willed, for they also are instruments of good in God's hand, and often most efficient ones. Without these thoughts, it would be hard for even the best of us always to keep our equanimity. But with the consciousness of divine guidance, one sees many a thing in life quite differently from what would otherwise be possible. All these are things that every human being knows, who has had experience of them, and of which the most speaking examples could be brought forward. The highest resources of worldly wisdom are unable to attain that which, under divine leading, comes to us of its own accord. Close, quote. But the expressions of meaning in it alter. It was dead and is alive again. It is like the difference between looking on a person without love or upon the same person with love. In the latter case, intercourse springs into new vitality. So in one's affections, keep in touch with the divinity of the world's authorship, fear and egotism fall away, and in the equanimity that follows, one finds, in the hours, as they succeed into each other, a series of purely benignant opportunities. It is as if all doors were opened and all paths freshly smoothed. We meet a new world when we meet the old world in the spirit, which this kind of prayer infuses. Such a spirit was that of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. Footnote says Epictetus, quote. Good heaven, any one thing in the creation is sufficient to demonstrate a providence to a humble and grateful mind. The mere possibility of producing milk from grass, cheese from milk, and wool from skins, who formed and planned it, ought we not, whether we dig or plow or eat, to sing this hymn to God? Great is God who has supplied us with these instruments to till the ground. Great is God who has given us hands and instruments of digestion, who has given us to grow insensibly and to breathe in sleep. These things we ought forever to celebrate. But because the most of you are blind and insensible, there must be someone to fill this station and lead, in behalf of all men, the hymn to God. For what else can I do, a lame old man, but sing hymns to God? Where I a nightingale, I would act the part of a nightingale, where I a swan, the part of a swan. But since I am a reasonable creature, it is my duty to praise God, and I call on you to join the same song. Close quote and footnote. It is that of mind-cures of the transcendentalists, of the so called liberal Christians. As an expression of it, I will quote a page from one of Martinau's sermons. Quote, The universe, open to the eye today, looks as it did a thousand years ago, and the morning hymn of Milton does but tell the beauty with which our own familiar son dressed the earlier fields and gardens of the world. We see what all our fathers saw, and if we cannot find God in your house or in mine, upon the roadside or the margin of the sea, in the bursting seed or the opening flower, in the day duty or the night musing, in the general laugh and the secret grief, in the procession of life ever entering afresh and solemnly passing by and dropping off. I do not think we should discern him any more on the grass of Eden or beneath the moonlight of Gethsemane. Depend upon it, it is not the want of greater miracles, but of the soul to perceive such as are allowed us still that makes us push all the sanctities into the far spaces we cannot reach. The devout feel that wherever God's hand is, there is miracle, and it is simply an indivouteness which imagines that only where miracle is can there be the real hand of God. The customs of heaven ought surely to be more sacred in our eyes than its anomalies. The dear old ways of which the most high is never tired, then the strange things which he does not love well enough ever to repeat. And he who will but discern beneath the sun as he rises any morning, the supporting finger of the Almighty, may recover the sweet and reverent surprise with which Adam gazed on the first dawn in paradise. It is no outward change, no shifting in time or place, but only the loving meditation of the pure in heart that can reawaken the eternal from the sleep within our souls, that can render him a reality again and reassert for him once more his ancient name of the living God. Close quote. When we see all things in God and refer all things to him, we read in common matters superior expressions of meaning. The deadness with which custom invents the familiar vanishes, and existence as a whole appears transfigured. The state of a mind thus awakened from torpor is well expressed in these words which I take from a friend's letter. Quote. If we occupy ourselves in summing up all the mercies and bounties we are privileged to have, we are overwhelmed by their number, so great that we can imagine ourselves unable to give ourselves time even to begin to review the things we may imagine we have not. We sum them and realize that we are actually killed with God's kindness that we are surrounded by bounties upon bounties without which all would fall. Should we not love it? Should we not feel buoyed up by the eternal arms? Close quote. Sometimes this realization of facts of the divine sending instead of being habitual is casual like a mystical experience. Father Gratchery gives this instance from his youthful melancholy period. Quote. One day I had a moment of consolation because I met with something which seemed to me ideally perfect. It was a poor drummer beating the tattoo in the streets of Paris. I walked behind him in returning to the school on the evening of a holiday. His drum gave out the tattoo in such a way that, at that moment at least, however peevish I were, I could find no pretext for fault finding. It was impossible to conceive more nerve or spirit, better time or measure, more clearness or richness than were in this drumming. Ideal desire could go no farther in that direction. I was enchanted and consoled. The perfection of this wretched act did me good. Good is at least possible, I said, since the ideal can thus sometimes get embodied. Close quote. In Sinoncure's novel of Obermann, a similar transient lifting of the veil is recorded. In Paris streets, on a March Day, he comes across a flower in bloom, a jaune quille. Quote. It was the strongest expression of desire. It was the first perfume of the year. I felt all the happiness destined for man. This unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal world, arose in me complete. I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous. I know not what shape, what analogy, what secret of relation it was that made me see in this flower a limitless beauty. I shall never enclose in a conception this power, this immensity that nothing will express, this form that nothing will contain, this ideal of a better world which one feels but which it seems nature has not made actual. Close quote. We heard in a previous lecture of the vivified face of the world as it may appear to converts after their awakening. As a rule, religious persons generally assume that whatever natural facts connect themselves in any way with their destiny are significant of the divine purposes with them. Through prayer, the purpose, often far from obvious, comes home to them. And if it be trial, strength to endure the trial is given. Thus, at all stages of the prayerful life, we find the persuasion that in the process of communion, energy from on high flows in to meet demand, and becomes operative within the phenomenal world. So long as this operativeness is admitted to be real, it makes no essential difference whether its immediate effects be subjective or objective. The fundamental religious point is that in prayer, spiritual energy, which otherwise would slumber, does become active, and spiritual work of some kind is effected really. So much for prayer, taken in the wide sense of any kind of communion. As the core of religion, we must return to it in the next lecture. The last aspect of the religious life, which remains for me to touch upon, is the fact that its manifestations so frequently connect themselves with a subconscious part of our existence. You may remember what I said in my opening lecture about the prevalence of the psychopathic temperament in religious biography. You will in point of fact hardly find a religious leader of any kind in whose life there is no record of automatisms. I speak not merely of savage priests and prophets, whose followers regard automatic utterance and action as by itself tantamount to inspiration. I speak of leaders of thought and subjects of intellectualized experience. Saint Paul had his visions, his ecstasies, his gift of tongues, small as was the importance he attached to the latter. The whole array of Christian saints and heresyarks, including the greatest, the Barnards, the Leolas, the Luthers, the Foxes, the Westleys, had their visions, voices, wrapped conditions, guiding impressions, and openings. They had these things because they had exalted sensibility, and to such things persons of exalted sensibility are liable. In such liability, their lie, however, consequences for theology. Beliefs are strengthened wherever automatisms corroborate them. Incursions from beyond the trans-marginal region have a peculiar power to increase conviction. The incoherent sense of presence is infinitely stronger than conception, but strong as it may be, it is seldom equal to the evidence of hallucination. Saints who actually see or hear their Savior reach the acme of assurance. Motor automatisms, though rarer are, if possible, even more convincing than sensations. The subjects here actually feel themselves played upon by powers beyond their will. The evidence is dynamic. The God or Spirit moves the very organs of their body. Footnoted. A friend of mine, a first-rate psychologist, who is a subject of graphic automatism, tells me that the appearance of independent actuation in the movements of his arm, when he writes automatically, is so distinct that it obliges him to abandon a psycho-physical theory, which he had previously believed in, the theory namely that we have no feeling of the discharge downwards of our voluntary motor sensors. We must normally have such a feeling, he thinks, or the sense of an absence would not be so striking as it is in these experiences. Graphic automatism of a fully developed kind is rare in religious history, so far as my knowledge goes. Such statement says Antonia Boregnon's that, quote, I do nothing but lend my hand and spirit to another power than mine. Close, quote, is shown by the context to indicate inspiration rather than directly automatic writing. In some eccentric sects, this latter occurs. The most striking instance of it is probably a bulky volume called Oaspi, a new Bible in the words of Jehovah and his angel ambassadors. Written and illustrated automatically by Dr. Newbrow of New York, whom I understood to be now or to have been lately, at the head of the spiritistic community of Shailam in New Mexico. The latest automatically written book, which has come under my notice, is Zert Tolem's Wisdom of the Ages by George A. Fuller. End footnote. The great field for this sense of being the instrument of a higher power is of course, inspiration. It is easy to discriminate between the religious leaders who have been habitually subject to inspiration and those who have not. In the teachings of the Buddha, of Jesus, of St. Paul, apart from the gift of tongues, of St. Augustine, of Hus, of Luther, of Wesley, automatic or semi-automatic composition appears to have been only occasional. In the Hebrew prophets, on the contrary, in Muhammad, in some of the Alexandrians, in many minor Catholic saints, in Vox, in Joseph Smith, something like it appears to have been frequent, sometimes habitual. We have distinct professions of being under the direction of a foreign power and serving as its mouthpiece. As regards the Hebrew prophets, it is extraordinary, writes an author who has made a careful study of them to see, quote, how one after another the same features are reproduced in the prophetic books. The process is always extremely different from what it would be if the prophet arrived at his insight into spiritual things by the tentative efforts of his own genius. There is something sharp and sudden about it. He can lay his finger, so to speak, on the moment when it came, and it always comes in the form of an overpowering force from without, against which he struggles but in vain. Listen, for instance, to the opening of the Book of Jeremiah. Read through, in like manner, the first two chapters of the prophecy of Ezekiel. It is not, however, only at the beginning of his career that the prophet passes through a crisis which is clearly not self-caused. Scattered all through the prophetic writings are expressions which speak of some strong and irresistible impulse coming down upon the prophet, determining his attitude to the events of his time, constraining his utterance, making his words the vehicle of a higher meaning than their own. For instance, this of Isaiah's. The Lord spake thus to me with a strong hand, an emphatic phrase which denotes the overmastering nature of the impulse, and instructed me that I should not walk in the way of this people, or passages like this from Ezekiel. The hand of the Lord God fell upon me. The hand of the Lord was strong upon me. The one standing characteristic of the prophet is that he speaks with the authority of Jehovah himself. Hence it is that the prophet's one and all preface their addresses so confidently. The word of the Lord, or thus sayeth the Lord. They have even the audacity to speak in the first person, as if Jehovah himself were speaking. As in Isaiah. Harken unto me, O Jacob and Israel, my called. I am he. I am the first. I also am the last. And so on. The personality of the prophet sinks entirely into the background and feels himself for the first time being the mouthpiece of the Almighty. We need to remember that prophecy was a profession, and that the prophets formed a professional class. There were schools of the prophets in which the gift was regularly cultivated. A group of young men would gather round some commanding figure, a Samuel or an Elisha, and would not only record or spread the knowledge of his sayings and doings, but seek to catch themselves something of his inspiration. It seems that music played its part in their exercises. It is perfectly clear that by no means all of these sons of the prophets ever succeeded in acquiring more than a very small share in the gift which they sought. It was clearly possible to counterfeit prophecy. Sometimes this was done deliberately, but it by no means follows that in all cases where a false message was given, the giver of it was altogether conscious of what he was doing. Close quote. Here, to take another Jewish case, is the way in which Philo of Alexandria describes his inspiration. Quote, Sometimes when I have come to my work empty, I have suddenly become full, ideas being in an invisible manner showered upon me, and implanted in me from on high, so that through the influence of divine inspiration I have become greatly excited, and have known neither the place in which I was, nor those who were present, nor myself, nor what I was saying, nor what I was writing, for then I have been conscious of a richness of interpretation, an enjoyment of light, a most penetrating insight, a most manifest energy in all that was to be done. Having such effect on my mind as the clearest ocular demonstration would have on the eyes. Close quote. If we turn to Islam, we find that Muhammad's revelations all came from the subconscious sphere to the question in what way he got them. Quote, Muhammad is said to have answered that sometimes he heard a knell as from Abel, and that this had the strongest effect on him, and when the angel went away he had received the revelation. Sometimes again he held converse with the angel as with a man, so as easily to understand his words. The later authorities, however, distinguish still other kinds. In the it gone the following are enumerated. One, revelations with sound of bell. Two, by inspiration of the Holy Spirit in M's heart. Three, by Gabriel in human form. Four, by God immediately, either when awake, as in his journey to heaven, or in a dream. In Allah Wahib Allah Dunya, the kinds are given thus. One, dream. Two, inspiration of Gabriel in the Prophet's heart. Three, Gabriel taking Dahya's form. Four, with the bell sound, etc. Five, Gabriel in propria persona. Only twice. Six, revelation in heaven. Seven, God appearing in person, but veiled. Eight, God revealing himself immediately without veil. Others add two other stages, namely, one, Gabriel in the form of still another man. Two, God showing himself personally in a dream. Close quote. In none of these cases is the revelation distinctly motor. In the case of Joseph Smith, who had prophetic revelations innumerable, in addition to the revealed translation of the gold plates which resulted in the Book of Mormon, although there have been a motor element, the inspiration seems to have been predominantly sensorial. He began his translation by the aid of the peep stones which he found, or thought or said that he found, with the gold plates. Apparently a case of crystal gazing. For some of the other revelations he used the peep stones, but seems generally to have asked the Lord for more direct instruction. Footnote. The Mormon theocracy has always been governed by direct revelations accorded to the president of the church and its apostles. From an obliging letter written to me in 1899 by an eminent Mormon, I quote the following extract. Quote. It may be very interesting for you to know that the president, Mr. Snow, of the Mormon church claims to have had a number of revelations very recently from heaven. To explain fully what these revelations are, it is necessary to know that we, as a people, believe that the Church of Jesus Christ has again been established through messengers sent from heaven. This church has at its head a prophet, seer, and revelator, who gives to man God's holy will. Revelation is the means through which the will of God is declared directly and in fullness to man. These revelations are got through dreams of sleep, or in waking visions of the mind, by voices without visual appearance, or by actual manifestations of the holy presence before the eye. We believe that God has come in person and spoken to our prophet and revelator. Close quote. End footnote. Other revelations are described as openings. Foxes, for example, were evidently of the kind known in spiritistic circles of today as impressions. As all effective initiators of change must needs live to some degree upon this psychopathic level of sudden perception or conviction of new truth, or of impulse to action so obsessive that it must be worked off, I will say nothing more about so very common a phenomenon. When, in addition to these phenomena of inspiration, we take religious mysticism into the account, when we recall the striking and sudden unifications of a discordant self which we saw in conversion, and when we review the extravagant obsessions of tenderness, purity, and self-severity met with insateliness, we cannot, I think, avoid the conclusion that in religion we have a department of human nature with unusually close relations to the trans-marginal or subliminal region. If the word subliminal is offensive to any of you, as smelling too much of psychical research or other aberrations, call it by any other name you please to distinguish it from the level of full sunlit consciousness. Call this latter the A region of personality, if you care to, and call the other the B region. The B region, then, is obviously the larger part of each of us, for it is the abode of everything that is latent, and the reservoir of everything that passes unrecorded or unobserved. It contains, for example, such things as all our momentary inactive memories, and it harbors the springs of all our obscurely motived passions, impulses, likes, dislikes, and prejudices. Our intuitions, hypotheses, fancies, superstitions, persuasions, convictions, and in general all our non-rational operations come from it. It is the source of our dreams, and apparently they may return to it. In it, whatever mystical experiences we may have, and our automatisms, sensory or motor, our life in hypnotic and hypnoid conditions, if we are subject to such conditions, our delusions, fixed ideas, and hysterical accidents, if we are hysteric subjects, our supranormal cognitions, if such there be, and if we are telepathic subjects. It is also the fountainhead of much that feeds our religion, in persons deep in religious life, as we have now abundantly seen, and this is my conclusion, the door into this region seems unusually wide open. At any rate, experiences making their entrance through that door have had emphatic influence in shaping religious history. With this conclusion, I turn back and close the circle which I opened in my first lecture, terminating thus the review which I then announced of inner religious phenomena as we find them in developed and articulate human individuals. I might easily, if the time allowed, multiply both documents and my discriminations, but a broad treatment is, I believe, in itself better and the most important characteristics of the subject lie, I think, before us already. In the next lecture, which is also the last one, we must try to draw the critical conclusions which so much material may suggest. End of lecture 19. Lecture 20, Part 1 of the Varieties of Religious Experience. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. Lecture 20, Part 1, Conclusions. The material of our study of human nature is now spread before us, and in this parting hour, set free from the duty of description, we can draw our theoretical and practical conclusions. In my first lecture, Defending the Empirical Method, I foretold that whatever conclusions we might come to could be reached by spiritual judgments only, applications of the significance for life of religion taken on the whole. Our conclusions cannot be as sharp as dogmatic conclusions would be, but I will formulate them when the time comes as sharply as I can. Summing up in the broadest possible way the characteristics of the religious life as we have found them, it includes the following beliefs. 1. That the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance. 2. That union or harmonious relation with that higher universe is our true end. 3. That prayer or inner communion with the spirit thereof, be that spirit God or law, is a process where in work is really done, and spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world. Religion includes also the following psychological characteristics. 4. A new zest which adds itself like a gift to life, and takes the form either of lyrical enchantment or of appeal to earnestness and heroism. 5. An assurance of safety and a temper of peace, and, in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affections. In illustrating these characteristics by documents we have been literally bathed in sentiment. In re-reading my manuscript I am almost appalled at the amount of emotionality which I find in it. After so much of this we can afford to be drier and less sympathetic in the rest of the work that lies before us. The sentimentality of my documents is a consequence of the fact that I sought them among the extravagances of the subject. If any of you are enemies of what our ancestors used to brand as enthusiasm, and are nevertheless still listening to me now, you have probably felt my selection to have been sometimes almost perverse, and have wished I might have stuck to soberer examples. I reply that I took these extremer examples as yielding the profounder information. To learn the secrets of any science we go to expert specialists, even though they may be eccentric persons, and not too commonplace pupils. We combine what they tell us with the rest of our wisdom, and form our final judgment independently. Even so with religion. We who have pursued such radical expressions of it may now be sure that we know its secrets as authentically as anyone can know them who learns them from another. And we have next to answer, each of us for himself, the practical question, what are the dangers in this element of life, and in what proportion may it need to be restrained by other elements to give the proper balance. But this question suggests another one which I will answer immediately and get it out of the way, for it has more than once already vexed us. Audit to be assumed that in all men the mixture of religion with other elements should be identical? Audit, indeed, to be assumed that the lives of all men should show identical religious elements? In other words, is the existence of so many religious types and sects and creeds regrettable? To these questions I answer no emphatically, and my reason is that I do not see how it is possible that creatures in such different positions and with such different powers as human individuals are, should have exactly the same functions and the same duties. No two of us have identical difficulties, nor should we be expected to work out identical solutions. Each, from his peculiar angle of observation, takes in a certain sphere of fact and trouble, which each must deal with in a unique manner. One of us must soften himself, another must harden himself, one must yield a point, another must stand firm, in order the better to defend the position assigned him. If an Emerson were forced to be a Wesley, or a Moody forced to be a Whitman, the total human consciousness of the divine would suffer. The divine can mean no single quality, it must mean a group of qualities, by being champions of which, in alternation, different men may all find worthy missions. Each attitude being a syllable in human nature's total message, it takes the whole of us to spell the meaning out completely. So a God of battles must be allowed to be the God for one kind of person, a God of peace and heaven and home, the God for another. We must frankly recognize the fact that we live in partial systems, and that parts are not interchangeable in the spiritual life. If we are peevish and jealous, destruction of the self must be an element of our religion. Why need it to be one if we are good and sympathetic from the outset? If we are sick souls, we require a religion of deliverance. But why think so much of deliverance if we are healthy-minded? Footnote. From this point of view, the contrasts between the healthy and the morbid mind, and between the once-born and the twice-born types, of which I spoke in earlier lectures, cease to be the radical antagonisms which many think them. The twice-born look down upon the rectilinear consciousness of life of the once-born as being mere morality, and not properly religion. An orthodox minister is reported to have said, quote, Dr. Channing is excluded from the highest form of religious life by the extraordinary rectitude of his character. Close quote. It is indeed true that the outlook upon life of the twice-born, holding as it does more of the element of evil in solution, is the wider and completer. The heroic or solemn way in which life comes to them is a higher synthesis into which healthy-mindedness and morbidness both enter and combine. Evil is not evaded but sublated in the higher religious cheer of these persons. But the final consciousness which each type reaches of union with the divine has the same practical significance for the individual, and individuals may well be allowed to get to it by the channels which lie most open to their several temperaments. In the cases which were quoted in lecture four of the mind-cure form of healthy-mindedness, we found abundant examples of regenerative process. The severity of the crisis in this process is a matter of degree. How long one shall continue to drink the consciousness of evil, and when one shall begin to short-circuit and get rid of it, are also matters of a mountain degree, so that in many instances it is quite arbitrary whether we class the individual as a once-born or a twice-born subject. End footnote. Unquestionably, some men have the completer experience and the higher vocation, here just as in the social world, but for each man to stay in his own experience, whatever it be, and for others to tolerate him there is surely best. But, you may now ask, would not this one-sidedness be cured if we should all espouse the science of religions as our own religion? In answering this question, I must open again the general relations of the Theoretic to the active life. Knowledge about a thing is not the thing itself. You remember what Al Ghassali told us in the lecture on mysticism, that to understand the causes of drunkenness as a physician understands them, is not to be drunk. A science might come to understand everything about the causes and elements of religion, and might even decide which elements were qualified by their general harmony with other branches of knowledge to be considered true, and yet the best man at this science might be the man who found it hardest to be personally devout. The name Régnan would doubtless occur to many persons as an example of the way in which breadth of knowledge may make one only a dilettante in possibilities, and blunt the acuteness of one's living faith. If religion be a function by which either God's cause or man's cause is to be really advanced, then he who lives the life of it, however narrowly, is a better servant than he who merely knows about it, however much. Knowledge about life is one thing. Effective occupation of a place in life with its dynamic currents passing through your being is another. For this reason, the science of religions may not be an equivalent for living religion, and if we turn to the inner difficulties of such a science, we see that a point comes when she must drop the purely theoretic attitude and either let her knots remain uncut or have them cut by active faith. To see this, suppose that we have our science of religions constituted as a matter of fact. Suppose that she has assimilated all the necessary historical material and distilled out of it as its essence the same conclusions which I myself, a few moments ago, pronounced. Suppose that she agrees that religion, wherever it is an active thing, involves a belief in ideal presences, and a belief that in our prayerful communion with them, work is done, and something real comes to pass. She has now to exert her critical activity and to decide how far in the light of other sciences and in that of general philosophy such beliefs can be considered true. Dogmatically, to decide this is an impossible task. Not only are the other sciences and the philosophy still far from being completed, but in their present state we find them full of conflicts. The sciences of nature know nothing of spiritual presences, and on the whole hold no practical commerce whatever with the idealistic conceptions towards which general philosophy inclines. The scientist, so-called, is, during his scientific hours at least, so materialistic that one may well say that the influence of science goes against the notion that religion should be recognized at all. And this antipathy to religion finds go within the very science of religions itself. The cultivator of this science has to become acquainted with so many groveling and horrible superstitions that a presumption easily arises in his mind that any belief that is religious probably is false. In the prayerful communion of savages with such mumbo-jumbos of deities as they acknowledge, it is hard for us to see what genuine spiritual work, even though it were work relative only to their dark savage obligations, can possibly be done. The consequence is that the conclusions of the science of religions are as likely to be adverse as they are to be favorable to the claim that the essence of religion is true. There is a notion in the air about us that religion is probably only an anachronism, a case of survival, an atavistic relapse into a mode of thought which humanity, in its more enlightened examples, has outgrown. And this notion, our religious anthropologists at present, do little to counteract. This view is so widespread at the present day that I must consider it with some explicitness before I pass to my own conclusions. Let me call it the survival theory for brevity's sake. The pivot round, which the religious life, as we have traced it, revolves, is the interest of the individual in his private personal destiny. Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism. The gods believed in, whether by crude savages or by men disciplined intellectually, agree with each other in recognizing personal calls. Religious thought is carried on in terms of personality, this being, in the world of religion, the one fundamental fact. Today, quite as much as at any previous age, the religious individual tells you that the divine meets him on the basis of his personal concerns. Science, on the other hand, has ended by utterly repudiating the personal point of view. She catalogues her elements and records her laws indifferent as to what purpose may be shown forth by them, and constructs her theories quite careless of their bearing on human anxieties and fates. Though the scientist may individually nourish a religion, and be a theist in his irresponsible hours, the days are over when it could be said that, for science herself, the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Our solar system, with its harmonies, is seen now as but one passing case of a certain sort of moving equilibrium in the heavens, realized by a local accident in an appalling wilderness of worlds where no life can exist. In a span of time which, as a cosmic interval, will count but as an hour, it will have ceased to be. The Darwinian notion of chance production and subsequent destruction, speedy or deferred, applies to the largest as well as to the smallest facts. It is impossible in the present temper of the scientific imagination to find in the driftings of the cosmic atoms, whether they work on the universal or on the particular scale, anything but a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing, achieving no proper history, and leaving no result. Nature has no one distinguishable ultimate tendency with which it is possible to feel a sympathy. In the vast rhythm of her processes, as the scientific mind now follows them, she appears to cancel herself. The books of natural theology which satisfied the intellects of our grandfathers seem to us quite grotesque, representing, as they did, a God who conformed the largest things of nature to the paltriest of our private wants. Footnote. How was it ever conceivable, we ask, that a man like Christian Wolf, in whose dry-as-dust head all the learning of the early 18th century was concentrated, should have preserved such a baby-like faith in the personal and human character of nature as to expound her operations, as he did in his work on the uses of natural things. This, for example, is the account he gives of the sun and its utility. Quote. We see that God has created the sun to keep the changeable conditions on the earth in such an order that living creatures, men and beasts, may inhabit its surface. Since men are the most reasonable of creatures, and able to infer God's invisible being from the contemplation of the world, the sun, in so far forth, contributes to the primary purpose of creation. Without it, the race of man could not be preserved or continued. The sun makes daylight, not only on our earth, but also on the other planets, and daylight is of the utmost utility to us. For by its means, we can commodiously carry on those occupations, which in the nighttime would either be quite impossible or at any rate impossible without our going to the expense of artificial light. The beasts of the field can find food by day, which they would not be able to find at night. Moreover, we owe it to the sunlight that we are able to see everything that is on the earth's surface, not only nearby, but also at a distance, and to recognize both near and far things according to their species, which, again, is of manifold use to us not only in the business necessary to human life, and when we are traveling, but also for the scientific knowledge of nature, which knowledge for the most part depends on observations made with help of sight, and, without the sunshine, would have been impossible. If anyone would rightly impress on his mind the great advantages which he derives from the sun, let him imagine himself living through only one month and see how it would be with all his undertakings if it were not day but night. He would then be sufficiently convinced out of his own experience, especially if he had much work to carry on in the streets or in the fields. From the sun we learn to recognize when it is midday, and by knowing this point of time exactly we can set our clocks right, on which account astronomy owes much to the sun. By help of the sun one can find the meridian, but the meridian is the basis of our sundials, and, generally speaking, we should have no sundials if we had no sun. Close quote. Or read the account of God's beneficence in the institution of, quote, the great variety throughout the world of men's faces, voices, and handwriting, close quote, given in Dirham's physical theology, a book that had much vogue in the 18th century, says Dr. Dirham, quote, had man's body been made according to any of the atheistical schemes, or any other method than that of the infinite Lord of the world. This wise variety would never have been, but men's faces would have been cast in the same, or not a very different mold. Their organs of speech would have sounded the same, or not so great a variety of notes, and the same structure of muscles and nerves would have given the hand the same direction in writing. And in this case, what confusion, what disturbance, what mischiefs would the world eternally have lain under? No security could have been to our persons, no certainty, no enjoyment of our possessions, no justice between man and man, no distinction between good and bad, between friends and foes, between father and child, husband and wife, male or female, but all would have been turned topsy-turvy, by being exposed to the malice of the envious and ill-natured, to the fraud and violence of knaves and robbers, to the forgeries of the crafty cheat, to the lusts of the effeminate and debauched, and whatnot. Our courts of justice can abundantly testify the dire effects of mistaking men's faces, of counterfeiting their hands and forging their writings. But now, as the infinitely wise creator and ruler hath ordered the matter, every man's face can distinguish him in the light and his voice in the dark. His handwriting can speak for him though absent, and be his witness, and secure his contracts in future generations. A manifest as well as admirable indication of the divine superintendence and management. Close quote. A God so careful as to make provision even for the unmistakable signing of bank checks and deeds was a deity truly after the heart of 18th century Anglicanism. I subjoin, omitting the capitals, Durham's vindication of God by the institution of hills and valleys, and Wolfe's altogether culinary account of the institution of water. Says Wolfe quote. The uses which water serves in human life are plain to see and need not be described at length. Water is a universal drink of man and beasts. Even though men have made themselves drinks that are artificial, they could not do this without water. Beer is brewed of water and malt, and it is the water in it which quenches thirst. Wine is prepared from grapes, which could never have grown without the help of water, and the same is true of those drinks which in England and other places they produce from fruit. Therefore, since God so planned the world that men and beasts should live upon it and find their everything required for their necessity and convenience, he also made water as one means whereby to make the earth into so excellent a dwelling. And this is all the more manifest when we consider the advantages which we obtain from this same water for the cleaning of our household utensils, of our clothing, and of other matters. When one goes into a grinding mill, one sees that the grindstone must always be kept wet, and then one will get a still greater idea of the use of water. Close quote. Of the hills and valleys Durham, after praising their beauty, discourses as follows. Quote, Some constitutions are indeed of so happy a strength and so confirmed in health, as to be indifferent to almost any place or temperature of the air. But then others are so weakly and feeble as not to be able to bear one, but can live comfortably in another place. With some, the more subtle and finer air of the hills doth best agree, who are languishing and dying in the feculent and grosser air of great towns, or even the warmer and vaporous air of the valleys and waters. But contrary wise, others languish on the hills and grow lusty and strong in the warmer air of the valleys. So that this opportunity of shifting our abode from the hills to the veils is an admirable easement, refreshment, and great benefit to the valetudinarian, feeble part of mankind, affording those an easy and comfortable life who would otherwise live miserably, languish, and pine away. To this salutary conformation of the earth, we may add another great convenience of the hills, and that is affording comodious places for habitation, serving, an eminent author worth it, as screams to keep off the cold and nipping blasts of the northern and easterly winds, and reflecting the benign and cherishing sunbeams, and so rendering our habitations both more comfortable and more cheerly in winter. Lastly, it is to the hills that the fountains owe their rise, and the rivers their conveyance, and consequently those vast masses and lofty piles are not, as they are charged, such rude and useless excrescences of our ill-formed globe, but the admirable tools of nature, contrived and ordered by the infinite creator to do one of its most useful works. For was the surface of the earth even and level, and the middle parts of its islands and continents, not mountainous and high as now it is? It is more certain there could be no descent for the rivers, no conveyance for the waters, but instead of gliding along those gentle declivities which the higherlands now afford them quite down to the sea, they would stagnate, and perhaps stink, and also drown large tracts of land. Thus the hills and veils, though to a peevish and weary traveler they may seem incomodious and troublesome, yet are a noble work of the great creator, and wisely appointed by him for the good of our sublunary world. Close quote, end footnote. The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals. The bubbles on the foam which coats a stormy sea are floating episodes, made and unmade, by the forces of the wind and water. Our private selves are like those bubbles, epiphenomenon, as Clifford I believe ingeniously called them, their destinies weigh nothing and determine nothing in the world's irredeemable currents of events. You see how natural it is from this point of view to treat religion as a mere survival, for religion does in fact perpetuate the traditions of the most primeval thought. To coerce the spiritual powers, or to square them and get them on our side was, during enormous tracts of time, the one great object in our dealings with the natural world. For our ancestors, dreams, hallucinations, revelations, and cock-and-bowl stories were inextricably mixed with facts. Up to a comparatively recent date, such distinctions as those between what has been verified, and what is only conjectured, between the impersonal and the personal aspects of existence, were hardly suspected or conceived. Whatever you imagined, in a lively manner, whatever you thought fit to be true, you affirmed confidently, and whatever you affirmed your comrades believed. Truth is what had not yet been contradicted. Most things were taken into the mind from the point of view of their human suggestiveness, and the attention confined itself exclusively to the aesthetic and dramatic aspects of events. Footnote Until the 17th century, this mode of thought prevailed. One need only recall the dramatic treatment even of mechanical questions by Aristotle, as, for example, his explanation of the power of the lever to make a small weight raise a larger one. This is due, according to Aristotle, to the generally miraculous character of the circle and of all circular movement. The circle is both convex and concave. It is made by a fixed point and a moving line, which contradicts each other, and whatever moves in a circle moves in opposite directions. Nevertheless, movement in a circle is the most natural movement, and the long arm of the lever, moving as it does in a larger circle, has the greater amount of this natural motion, and consequently requires the lesser force. Or recall the explanation by Herodotus of the position of the sun in winter. It moves to the south because of the cold which delves it into the warmer parts of the heavens over Libya. Or listen to St. Augustine's speculations. Quote, Who gave to chaff such power to freeze that it preserves snow buried under it, and such power to warm that it ripens green fruit? Who can explain the strange properties of fire itself, which blackens all that it burns, though itself bright, and which, though of the most beautiful colors, discolors almost all that it touches and feeds upon, and turns blazing fuel into grimy cinders? Then what wonderful properties do we find in charcoal, which is so brittle that a light tap breaks it, and a slight pressure pulverizes it, and yet is so strong that no moisture rots it nor any time causes it to decay? Close quote. Such aspects of things as these, their naturalness and unnaturalness, the sympathies and antipathies of their superficial qualities, their eccentricities, their brightness and strength and destructiveness, wear inevitably the ways in which they originally fastened our attention. If you open early medical books, you will find sympathetic magic invoked on every page. Take, for example, the famous Vulnerary Ointment attributed to Perichelsus. For this, there were a variety of receipts, including usually human fat, the fat of either a bull, a wild boar, or a bear, powdered earthworms, the Usnia, or mossy growth on the weathered skull of a hanged criminal, and other materials equally unpleasant. The whole prepared under the planet Venus, if possible, but never under Mars or Saturn. Then, if a splinter of wood dipped in the patient's blood, or the blood-stained weapon that wounded him be immersed in this ointment, the wound itself being tightly bound up, the latter infallibly gets well. I quote now Von Helmholtz's account. Quote, For the blood on the weapon or splinter containing in it the spirit of the wounded man is roused to active excitement by the contact of the ointment, whence there results to it a full commission or power to cure its cousin German, the blood in the patient's body. This it does by sucking out the Doloros and exotic impression from the wounded part, but to do this it has to implore the aid of the bull's fat and other portions of the urgent. The reason why the bull's fat is so powerful is that the bull, at the time of slaughter, is full of secret reluctancy and vindictive murmurs, and therefore dies with a higher flame of revenge about him than any other animal. Close quote. And thus we have made it out, says this author, that the admirable efficacy of the ointment ought to be imputed not to any auxiliary concurrence of Satan, but simply to the energy of the posthumous character of revenge remaining firmly impressed upon the blood and concreted fat in the urgent. The author goes on to prove by the analogy of many other natural facts that this sympathetic action between things at a distance is the true rationale of the case. He says, quote, If the heart of a horse slain by a witch taken out of the yet reeking carcass be impaled upon an arrow and roasted, immediately the whole witch becomes tormented with the insufferable pains and cruelty of the fire, which could by no means happen unless there preceded a conjunction of the spirit of the witch with the spirit of the horse. In the reeking and yet panting heart the spirit of the witch is kept captive and the retreat of it prevented by the arrow transfixed. Similarly hath not many a murdered carcass at the coroner's inquest suffered a fresh hemorrhage or cruentation at the presence of the assassin, the blood being as in a furious fit of anger enraged and agitated by the impress of revenge conceived against the murderer at the instant of the soul's compulsive exile from the body. So if you have dropsy, gout, or jaundice by including some of your warm blood in the shell and white of an egg, which exposed to a gentle heat and mixed with a bait of flesh, you shall give to a hungry dog or hog. The disease shall instantly pass from you into the animal and leave you entirely. And similarly again, if you burn some of the milk either of a cow or of a woman, the gland from which it issued will dry up. A gentleman at Brussels had his nose mowed off in a combat, and the accelerated surgeon Tagliacosas did a new nose for him out of the skin of the arm of a porter at Bologna. About thirteen months after his return to his own country, the engrafted nose grew cold, putrified, and in a few days dropped off, and it was then discovered that the porter had expired near about the same punctilio of time. There are still, at Brussels, eyewitnesses of this occurrence. Close quote. Van Helmont then adds, quote, I pray, what is there in this of superstition or of exalted imagination? Close quote. Modern mind cure literature, the works of Prentice Mulford, for example, is full of sympathetic magic. End footnote. How indeed could it be otherwise The extraordinary value for explanation and provision of those mathematical and mechanical modes of conception, which science uses, was a result that could not possibly have been expected in advance. Weight, movement, velocity, direction, position. What thin, pallid, uninteresting ideas. How could the richer animistic aspects of nature, the peculiarities and oddities that make phenomena picturesquely striking or expressive, fail to have been first singled out and followed by philosophy as the more promising avenue to the knowledge of nature's life? Well, it is still in these richer, animistic, and dramatic aspects that religion delights to dwell. It is the terror and beauty of phenomena, the promise of the dawn and of the rainbow, the voice of the thunder, the gentleness of the summer rain, the sublimity of the stars, and not the physical laws which these things follow, by which the religious mind still continues to be most impressed. And just as of yore, the devout man tells you that in the solitude of his room or of the field, he still feels the divine presence, that inflowings of help come and reply to his prayers, and that sacrifices to this unseen reality fill him with security and peace. Pure anachronism, says the survival theory, anachronism for which de-anthropomorphization of the imagination is the remedy required. The less we mix the private with the cosmic, the more we dwell in universal and impersonal terms, the truer heirs of science we become. And of lecture 20, part 1.