Chapter XII: Part 12

“Therefore, in our rooms,” Father Rodriguez continues, “there must
be no other furniture than a bed, a table, a bench, and a
candlestick, things purely necessary, and nothing more. It is not
allowed among us that our cells should be ornamented with pictures
or aught else, neither armchairs, carpets, curtains, nor any sort
of cabinet or bureau of any elegance. Neither is it allowed us to
keep anything to eat, either for ourselves or for those who may
come to visit us. We must ask permission to go to the refectory
even for a glass of water; and finally we may not keep a book in
which we can write a line, or which we may take away with us. One
cannot deny that thus we are in great poverty. But this poverty is
at the same time a great repose and a great perfection. For it
would be inevitable, in case a religious person were allowed to
own superfluous possessions, that these things would greatly
occupy his mind, be it to acquire them, to preserve them, or to
increase them; so that in not permitting us at all to own them,
all these inconveniences are remedied. Among the various good
reasons why the company forbids secular persons to enter our
cells, the principal one is that thus we may the easier be kept in
poverty. After all, we are all men, and if we were to receive
people of the world into our rooms, we should not have the
strength to remain within the bounds prescribed, but should at
least wish to adorn them with some books to give the visitors a
better opinion of our scholarship.”(191)

Since Hindu fakirs, Buddhist monks, and Mohammedan dervishes unite with Jesuits and Franciscans in idealizing poverty as the loftiest individual state, it is worth while to examine into the spiritual grounds for such a seemingly unnatural opinion. And first, of those which lie closest to common human nature.

The opposition between the men who _have_ and the men who _are_ is immemorial. Though the gentleman, in the old‐fashioned sense of the man who is well born, has usually in point of fact been predaceous and reveled in lands and goods, yet he has never identified his essence with these possessions, but rather with the personal superiorities, the courage, generosity, and pride supposed to be his birthright. To certain huckstering kinds of consideration he thanked God he was forever inaccessible, and if in life’s vicissitudes he should become destitute through their lack, he was glad to think that with his sheer valor he was all the freer to work out his salvation. “Wer nur selbst was hätte,” says Lessing’s Tempelherr, in Nathan the Wise, “mein Gott, mein Gott, ich habe nichts!” This ideal of the well‐born man without possessions was embodied in knight‐errantry and templardom; and, hideously corrupted as it has always been, it still dominates sentimentally, if not practically, the military and aristocratic view of life. We glorify the soldier as the man absolutely unencumbered. Owning nothing but his bare life, and willing to toss that up at any moment when the cause commands him, he is the representative of unhampered freedom in ideal directions. The laborer who pays with his person day by day, and has no rights invested in the future, offers also much of this ideal detachment. Like the savage, he may make his bed wherever his right arm can support him, and from his simple and athletic attitude of observation, the property‐owner seems buried and smothered in ignoble externalities and trammels, “wading in straw and rubbish to his knees.” The claims which _things_ make are corrupters of manhood, mortgages on the soul, and a drag anchor on our progress towards the empyrean.

“Everything I meet with,” writes Whitefield, “seems to carry this
voice with it,—‘Go thou and preach the Gospel; be a pilgrim on
earth; have no party or certain dwelling place.’ My heart echoes
back, ‘Lord Jesus, help me to do or suffer thy will. When thou
seest me in danger of _nestling_,—in pity—in tender pity,—put a
_thorn_ in my nest to prevent me from it.’ ”(192)

The loathing of “capital” with which our laboring classes to‐day are growing more and more infected seems largely composed of this sound sentiment of antipathy for lives based on mere having. As an anarchist poet writes:—

“Not by accumulating riches, but by giving away that which you
have,

“Shall you become beautiful;

“You must undo the wrappings, not case yourself in fresh ones;

“Not by multiplying clothes shall you make your body sound and
healthy, but rather by discarding them ...

“For a soldier who is going on a campaign does not seek what fresh
furniture he can carry on his back, but rather what he can leave
behind;

“Knowing well that every additional thing which he cannot freely
use and handle is an impediment.”(193)

In short, lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or on being, and in the interest of action people subject to spiritual excitement throw away possessions as so many clogs. Only those who have no private interests can follow an ideal straight away. Sloth and cowardice creep in with every dollar or guinea we have to guard. When a brother novice came to Saint Francis, saying: “Father, it would be a great consolation to me to own a psalter, but even supposing that our general should concede to me this indulgence, still I should like also to have your consent,” Francis put him off with the examples of Charlemagne, Roland, and Oliver, pursuing the infidels in sweat and labor, and finally dying on the field of battle. “So care not,” he said, “for owning books and knowledge, but care rather for works of goodness.” And when some weeks later the novice came again to talk of his craving for the psalter, Francis said: “After you have got your psalter you will crave a breviary; and after you have got your breviary you will sit in your stall like a grand prelate, and will say to your brother: ‘Hand me my breviary.’ ... And thenceforward he denied all such requests, saying: ‘A man possesses of learning only so much as comes out of him in action, and a monk is a good preacher only so far as his deeds proclaim him such, for every tree is known by its fruits.’ ”(194)

But beyond this more worthily athletic attitude involved in doing and being, there is, in the desire of not having, something profounder still, something related to that fundamental mystery of religious experience, the satisfaction found in absolute surrender to the larger power. So long as any secular safeguard is retained, so long as any residual prudential guarantee is clung to, so long the surrender is incomplete, the vital crisis is not passed, fear still stands sentinel, and mistrust of the divine obtains: we hold by two anchors, looking to God, it is true, after a fashion, but also holding by our proper machinations. In certain medical experiences we have the same critical point to overcome. A drunkard, or a morphine or cocaine maniac, offers himself to be cured. He appeals to the doctor to wean him from his enemy, but he dares not face blank abstinence. The tyrannical drug is still an anchor to windward: he hides supplies of it among his clothing; arranges secretly to have it smuggled in in case of need. Even so an incompletely regenerate man still trusts in his own expedients. His money is like the sleeping potion which the chronically wakeful patient keeps beside his bed; he throws himself on God, but _if_ he should need the other help, there it will be also. Every one knows cases of this incomplete and ineffective desire for reform,—drunkards whom, with all their self‐reproaches and resolves, one perceives to be quite unwilling seriously to contemplate _never_ being drunk again! Really to give up anything on which we have relied, to give it up definitively, “for good and all” and forever, signifies one of those radical alterations of character which came under our notice in the lectures on conversion. In it the inner man rolls over into an entirely different position of equilibrium, lives in a new centre of energy from this time on, and the turning‐point and hinge of all such operations seems usually to involve the sincere acceptance of certain nakednesses and destitutions.

Accordingly, throughout the annals of the saintly life, we find this ever‐ recurring note: Fling yourself upon God’s providence without making any reserve whatever,—take no thought for the morrow,—sell all you have and give it to the poor,—only when the sacrifice is ruthless and reckless will the higher safety really arrive. As a concrete example let me read a page from the biography of Antoinette Bourignon, a good woman, much persecuted in her day by both Protestants and Catholics, because she would not take her religion at second hand. When a young girl, in her father’s house,—

“She spent whole nights in prayer, oft repeating: _Lord, what wilt
thou have me to do?_ And being one night in a most profound
penitence, she said from the bottom of her heart: ‘O my Lord! What
must I do to please thee? For I have nobody to teach me. Speak to
my soul and it will hear thee.’ At that instant she heard, as if
another had spoke within her: _Forsake all earthly things.
Separate thyself from the love of the creatures. Deny thyself._
She was quite astonished, not understanding this language, and
mused long on these three points, thinking how she could fulfill
them. She thought she could not live without earthly things, nor
without loving the creatures, nor without loving herself. Yet she
said, ‘By thy Grace I will do it, Lord!’ But when she would
perform her promise, she knew not where to begin. Having thought
on the religious in monasteries, that they forsook all earthly
things by being shut up in a cloister, and the love of themselves
by subjecting of their wills, she asked leave of her father to
enter into a cloister of the barefoot Carmelites, but he would not
permit it, saying he would rather see her laid in her grave. This
seemed to her a great cruelty, for she thought to find in the
cloister the true Christians she had been seeking, but she found
afterwards that he knew the cloisters better than she; for after
he had forbidden her, and told her he would never permit her to be
a religious, nor give her any money to enter there, yet she went
to Father Laurens, the Director, and offered to serve in the
monastery and work hard for her bread, and be content with little,
if he would receive her. At which he smiled and said: _That cannot
be. We must have money to build; we take no maids without money;
you must find the way to get it, else there is no entry here._

“This astonished her greatly, and she was thereby undeceived as to
the cloisters, resolving to forsake all company and live alone
till it should please God to show her what she ought to do and
whither to go. She asked always earnestly, ‘When shall I be
perfectly thine, O my God?’ And she thought he still answered her,
_When thou shalt no longer possess anything, and shalt die to
thyself_. ‘And where shall I do that, Lord?’ He answered her, _In
the desert_. This made so strong an impression on her soul that
she aspired after this; but being a maid of eighteen years only,
she was afraid of unlucky chances, and was never used to travel,
and knew no way. She laid aside all these doubts and said, ‘Lord,
thou wilt guide me how and where it shall please thee. It is for
thee that I do it. I will lay aside my habit of a maid, and will
take that of a hermit that I may pass unknown.’ Having then
secretly made ready this habit, while her parents thought to have
married her, her father having promised her to a rich French
merchant, she prevented the time, and on Easter evening, having
cut her hair, put on the habit, and slept a little, she went out
of her chamber about four in the morning, taking nothing but one
penny to buy bread for that day. And it being said to her in the
going out, _Where is thy faith? in a penny?_ she threw it away,
begging pardon of God for her fault, and saying, ‘No, Lord, my
faith is not in a penny, but in thee alone.’ Thus she went away
wholly delivered from the heavy burthen of the cares and good
things of this world, and found her soul so satisfied that she no
longer wished for anything upon earth, resting entirely upon God,
with this only fear lest she should be discovered and be obliged
to return home; for she felt already more content in this poverty
than she had done for all her life in all the delights of the
world.”(195)

The penny was a small financial safeguard, but an effective spiritual obstacle. Not till it was thrown away could the character settle into the new equilibrium completely.

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Over and above the mystery of self‐surrender, there are in the cult of poverty other religious mysteries. There is the mystery of veracity: “Naked came I into the world,” etc.,—whoever first said that, possessed this mystery. My own bare entity must fight the battle—shams cannot save me. There is also the mystery of democracy, or sentiment of the equality before God of all his creatures. This sentiment (which seems in general to have been more widespread in Mohammedan than in Christian lands) tends to nullify man’s usual acquisitiveness. Those who have it spurn dignities and honors, privileges and advantages, preferring, as I said in a former lecture, to grovel on the common level before the face of God. It is not exactly the sentiment of humility, though it comes so close to it in practice. It is _humanity_, rather, refusing to enjoy anything that others do not share. A profound moralist, writing of Christ’s saying, “Sell all thou hast and follow me,” proceeds as follows:—

“Christ may have meant: If you love mankind absolutely you will as
a result not care for any possessions whatever, and this seems a
very likely proposition. But it is one thing to believe that a
proposition is probably true; it is another thing to see it as a
fact. If you loved mankind as Christ loved them, you would see his
conclusion as a fact. It would be obvious. You would sell your
goods, and they would be no loss to you. These truths, while
literal to Christ, and to any mind that has Christ’s love for
mankind, become parables to lesser natures. There are in every
generation people who, beginning innocently, with no predetermined
intention of becoming saints, find themselves drawn into the
vortex by their interest in helping mankind, and by the
understanding that comes from actually doing it. The abandonment
of their old mode of life is like dust in the balance. It is done
gradually, incidentally, imperceptibly. Thus the whole question of
the abandonment of luxury is no question at all, but a mere
incident to another question, namely, the degree to which we
abandon ourselves to the remorseless logic of our love for
others.”(196)

But in all these matters of sentiment one must have “been there” one’s self in order to understand them. No American can ever attain to understanding the loyalty of a Briton towards his king, of a German towards his emperor; nor can a Briton or German ever understand the peace of heart of an American in having no king, no Kaiser, no spurious nonsense, between him and the common God of all. If sentiments as simple as these are mysteries which one must receive as gifts of birth, how much more is this the case with those subtler religious sentiments which we have been considering! One can never fathom an emotion or divine its dictates by standing outside of it. In the glowing hour of excitement, however, all incomprehensibilities are solved, and what was so enigmatical from without becomes transparently obvious. Each emotion obeys a logic of its own, and makes deductions which no other logic can draw. Piety and charity live in a different universe from worldly lusts and fears, and form another centre of energy altogether. As in a supreme sorrow lesser vexations may become a consolation; as a supreme love may turn minor sacrifices into gain; so a supreme trust may render common safeguards odious, and in certain glows of generous excitement it may appear unspeakably mean to retain one’s hold of personal possessions. The only sound plan, if we are ourselves outside the pale of such emotions, is to observe as well as we are able those who feel them, and to record faithfully what we observe; and this, I need hardly say, is what I have striven to do in these last two descriptive lectures, which I now hope will have covered the ground sufficiently for our present needs.

LECTURES XIV AND XV. THE VALUE OF SAINTLINESS.

We have now passed in review the more important of the phenomena which are regarded as fruits of genuine religion and characteristics of men who are devout. To‐day we have to change our attitude from that of description to that of appreciation; we have to ask whether the fruits in question can help us to judge the absolute value of what religion adds to human life. Were I to parody Kant, I should say that a “Critique of pure Saintliness” must be our theme.

If, in turning to this theme, we could descend upon our subject from above like Catholic theologians, with our fixed definitions of man and man’s perfection and our positive dogmas about God, we should have an easy time of it. Man’s perfection would be the fulfillment of his end; and his end would be union with his Maker. That union could be pursued by him along three paths, active, purgative, and contemplative, respectively; and progress along either path would be a simple matter to measure by the application of a limited number of theological and moral conceptions and definitions. The absolute significance and value of any bit of religious experience we might hear of would thus be given almost mathematically into our hands.

If convenience were everything, we ought now to grieve at finding ourselves cut off from so admirably convenient a method as this. But we did cut ourselves off from it deliberately in those remarks which you remember we made, in our first lecture, about the empirical method; and it must be confessed that after that act of renunciation we can never hope for clean‐cut and scholastic results. _We_ cannot divide man sharply into an animal and a rational part. _We_ cannot distinguish natural from supernatural effects; nor among the latter know which are favors of God, and which are counterfeit operations of the demon. We have merely to collect things together without any special _a priori_ theological system, and out of an aggregate of piecemeal judgments as to the value of this and that experience—judgments in which our general philosophic prejudices, our instincts, and our common sense are our only guides—decide that _on the whole_ one type of religion is approved by its fruits, and another type condemned. “On the whole,”—I fear we shall never escape complicity with that qualification, so dear to your practical man, so repugnant to your systematizer!

I also fear that as I make this frank confession, I may seem to some of you to throw our compass overboard, and to adopt caprice as our pilot. Skepticism or wayward choice, you may think, can be the only results of such a formless method as I have taken up. A few remarks in deprecation of such an opinion, and in farther explanation of the empiricist principles which I profess, may therefore appear at this point to be in place.

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Abstractly, it would seem illogical to try to measure the worth of a religion’s fruits in merely human terms of value. How _can_ you measure their worth without considering whether the God really exists who is supposed to inspire them? If he really exists, then all the conduct instituted by men to meet his wants must necessarily be a reasonable fruit of his religion,—it would be unreasonable only in case he did not exist. If, for instance, you were to condemn a religion of human or animal sacrifices by virtue of your subjective sentiments, and if all the while a deity were really there demanding such sacrifices, you would be making a theoretical mistake by tacitly assuming that the deity must be non‐ existent; you would be setting up a theology of your own as much as if you were a scholastic philosopher.

To this extent, to the extent of disbelieving peremptorily in certain types of deity, I frankly confess that we must be theologians. If disbeliefs can be said to constitute a theology, then the prejudices, instincts, and common sense which I chose as our guides make theological partisans of us whenever they make certain beliefs abhorrent.

But such common‐sense prejudices and instincts are themselves the fruit of an empirical evolution. Nothing is more striking than the secular alteration that goes on in the moral and religious tone of men, as their insight into nature and their social arrangements progressively develop. After an interval of a few generations the mental climate proves unfavorable to notions of the deity which at an earlier date were perfectly satisfactory: the older gods have fallen below the common secular level, and can no longer be believed in. To‐day a deity who should require bleeding sacrifices to placate him would be too sanguinary to be taken seriously. Even if powerful historical credentials were put forward in his favor, we would not look at them. Once, on the contrary, his cruel appetites were of themselves credentials. They positively recommended him to men’s imaginations in ages when such coarse signs of power were respected and no others could be understood. Such deities then were worshiped because such fruits were relished.

Doubtless historic accidents always played some later part, but the original factor in fixing the figure of the gods must always have been psychological. The deity to whom the prophets, seers, and devotees who founded the particular cult bore witness was worth something to them personally. They could use him. He guided their imagination, warranted their hopes, and controlled their will,—or else they required him as a safeguard against the demon and a curber of other people’s crimes. In any case, they chose him for the value of the fruits he seemed to them to yield. So soon as the fruits began to seem quite worthless; so soon as they conflicted with indispensable human ideals, or thwarted too extensively other values; so soon as they appeared childish, contemptible, or immoral when reflected on, the deity grew discredited, and was erelong neglected and forgotten. It was in this way that the Greek and Roman gods ceased to be believed in by educated pagans; it is thus that we ourselves judge of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Mohammedan theologies; Protestants have so dealt with the Catholic notions of deity, and liberal Protestants with older Protestant notions; it is thus that Chinamen judge of us, and that all of us now living will be judged by our descendants. When we cease to admire or approve what the definition of a deity implies, we end by deeming that deity incredible.

Few historic changes are more curious than these mutations of theological opinion. The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our own forefathers that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their deity seems positively to have been required by their imagination. They called the cruelty “retributive justice,” and a God without it would certainly have struck them as not “sovereign” enough. But to‐day we abhor the very notion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary dealing‐out of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could persuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a “delightful conviction,” as of a doctrine “exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet,” appears to us, if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean. Not only the cruelty, but the paltriness of character of the gods believed in by earlier centuries also strikes later centuries with surprise. We shall see examples of it from the annals of Catholic saintship which make us rub our Protestant eyes. Ritual worship in general appears to the modern transcendentalist, as well as to the ultra‐puritanic type of mind, as if addressed to a deity of an almost absurdly childish character, taking delight in toy‐shop furniture, tapers and tinsel, costume and mumbling and mummery, and finding his “glory” incomprehensibly enhanced thereby;—just as on the other hand the formless spaciousness of pantheism appears quite empty to ritualistic natures, and the gaunt theism of evangelical sects seems intolerably bald and chalky and bleak. Luther, says Emerson, would have cut off his right hand rather than nail his theses to the door at Wittenberg, if he had supposed that they were destined to lead to the pale negations of Boston Unitarianism.

So far, then, although we are compelled, whatever may be our pretensions to empiricism, to employ some sort of a standard of theological probability of our own whenever we assume to estimate the fruits of other men’s religion, yet this very standard has been begotten out of the drift of common life. It is the voice of human experience within us, judging and condemning all gods that stand athwart the pathway along which it feels itself to be advancing. Experience, if we take it in the largest sense, is thus the parent of those disbeliefs which, it was charged, were inconsistent with the experiential method. The inconsistency, you see, is immaterial, and the charge may be neglected.

If we pass from disbeliefs to positive beliefs, it seems to me that there is not even a formal inconsistency to be laid against our method. The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another. What I then propose to do is, briefly stated, to test saintliness by common sense, to use human standards to help us decide how far the religious life commends itself as an ideal kind of human activity. If it commends itself, then any theological beliefs that may inspire it, in so far forth will stand accredited. If not, then they will be discredited, and all without reference to anything but human working principles. It is but the elimination of the humanly unfit, and the survival of the humanly fittest, applied to religious beliefs; and if we look at history candidly and without prejudice, we have to admit that no religion has ever in the long run established or proved itself in any other way. Religions have _approved_ themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.

The needs were always many, and the tests were never sharp. So the reproach of vagueness and subjectivity and “on the whole”‐ness, which can with perfect legitimacy be addressed to the empirical method as we are forced to use it, is after all a reproach to which the entire life of man in dealing with these matters is obnoxious. No religion has ever yet owed its prevalence to “apodictic certainty.” In a later lecture I will ask whether objective certainty can ever be added by theological reasoning to a religion that already empirically prevails.

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One word, also, about the reproach that in following this sort of an empirical method we are handing ourselves over to systematic skepticism.

Since it is impossible to deny secular alterations in our sentiments and needs, it would be absurd to affirm that one’s own age of the world can be beyond correction by the next age. Skepticism cannot, therefore, be ruled out by any set of thinkers as a possibility against which their conclusions are secure; and no empiricist ought to claim exemption from this universal liability. But to admit one’s liability to correction is one thing, and to embark upon a sea of wanton doubt is another. Of willfully playing into the hands of skepticism we cannot be accused. He who acknowledges the imperfectness of his instrument, and makes allowance for it in discussing his observations, is in a much better position for gaining truth than if he claimed his instrument to be infallible. Or is dogmatic or scholastic theology less doubted in point of fact for claiming, as it does, to be in point of right undoubtable? And if not, what command over truth would this kind of theology really lose if, instead of absolute certainty, she only claimed reasonable probability for her conclusions? If _we_ claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp. Pretty surely it will be more than we could have had, if we were unconscious of our liability to err.

Nevertheless, dogmatism will doubtless continue to condemn us for this confession. The mere outward form of inalterable certainty is so precious to some minds that to renounce it explicitly is for them out of the question. They will claim it even where the facts most patently pronounce its folly. But the safe thing is surely to recognize that all the insights of creatures of a day like ourselves must be provisional. The wisest of critics is an altering being, subject to the better insight of the morrow, and right at any moment, only “up to date” and “on the whole.” When larger ranges of truth open, it is surely best to be able to open ourselves to their reception, unfettered by our previous pretensions. “Heartily know, when half‐gods go, the gods arrive.”

The fact of diverse judgments about religious phenomena is therefore entirely unescapable, whatever may be one’s own desire to attain the irreversible. But apart from that fact, a more fundamental question awaits us, the question whether men’s opinions ought to be expected to be absolutely uniform in this field. Ought all men to have the same religion? Ought they to approve the same fruits and follow the same leadings? Are they so like in their inner needs that, for hard and soft, for proud and humble, for strenuous and lazy, for healthy‐minded and despairing, exactly the same religious incentives are required? Or are different functions in the organism of humanity allotted to different types of man, so that some may really be the better for a religion of consolation and reassurance, whilst others are better for one of terror and reproof? It might conceivably be so; and we shall, I think, more and more suspect it to be so as we go on. And if it be so, how can any possible judge or critic help being biased in favor of the religion by which his own needs are best met? He aspires to impartiality; but he is too close to the struggle not to be to some degree a participant, and he is sure to approve most warmly those fruits of piety in others which taste most good and prove most nourishing to _him_.

I am well aware of how anarchic much of what I say may sound. Expressing myself thus abstractly and briefly, I may seem to despair of the very notion of truth. But I beseech you to reserve your judgment until we see it applied to the details which lie before us. I do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable truth about such matters of fact as those with which religions deal. But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight in intellectual instability. I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly. That we can gain more and more of it by moving always in the right direction, I believe as much as any one, and I hope to bring you all to my way of thinking before the termination of these lectures. Till then, do not, I pray you, harden your minds irrevocably against the empiricism which I profess.

I will waste no more words, then, in abstract justification of my method, but seek immediately to use it upon the facts.

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In critically judging of the value of religious phenomena, it is very important to insist on the distinction between religion as an individual personal function, and religion as an institutional, corporate, or tribal product. I drew this distinction, you may remember, in my second lecture. The word “religion,” as ordinarily used, is equivocal. A survey of history shows us that, as a rule, religious geniuses attract disciples, and produce groups of sympathizers. When these groups get strong enough to “organize” themselves, they become ecclesiastical institutions with corporate ambitions of their own. The spirit of politics and the lust of dogmatic rule are then apt to enter and to contaminate the originally innocent thing; so that when we hear the word “religion” nowadays, we think inevitably of some “church” or other; and to some persons the word “church” suggests so much hypocrisy and tyranny and meanness and tenacity of superstition that in a wholesale undiscerning way they glory in saying that they are “down” on religion altogether. Even we who belong to churches do not exempt other churches than our own from the general condemnation.

But in this course of lectures ecclesiastical institutions hardly concern us at all. The religious experience which we are studying is that which lives itself out within the private breast. First‐hand individual experience of this kind has always appeared as a heretical sort of innovation to those who witnessed its birth. Naked comes it into the world and lonely; and it has always, for a time at least, driven him who had it into the wilderness, often into the literal wilderness out of doors, where the Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, St. Francis, George Fox, and so many others had to go. George Fox expresses well this isolation; and I can do no better at this point than read to you a page from his Journal, referring to the period of his youth when religion began to ferment within him seriously.

“I fasted much,” Fox says, “walked abroad in solitary places many
days, and often took my Bible, and sat in hollow trees and
lonesome places until night came on; and frequently in the night
walked mournfully about by myself; for I was a man of sorrows in
the time of the first workings of the Lord in me.

“During all this time I was never joined in profession of religion
with any, but gave up myself to the Lord, having forsaken all evil
company, taking leave of father and mother, and all other
relations, and traveled up and down as a stranger on the earth,
which way the Lord inclined my heart; taking a chamber to myself
in the town where I came, and tarrying sometimes more, sometimes
less in a place: for I durst not stay long in a place, being
afraid both of professor and profane, lest, being a tender young
man, I should be hurt by conversing much with either. For which
reason I kept much as a stranger, seeking heavenly wisdom and
getting knowledge from the Lord; and was brought off from outward
things, to rely on the Lord alone. As I had forsaken the priests,
so I left the separate preachers also, and those called the most
experienced people; for I saw there was none among them all that
could speak to my condition. And when all my hopes in them and in
all men were gone so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor
could tell what to do; then, oh then, I heard a voice which said,
‘There is one, even Jesus Christ, that can speak to thy
condition.’ When I heard it, my heart did leap for joy. Then the
Lord let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak
to my condition. I had not fellowship with any people, priests,
nor professors, nor any sort of separated people. I was afraid of
all carnal talk and talkers, for I could see nothing but
corruptions. When I was in the deep, under all shut up, I could
not believe that I should ever overcome; my troubles, my sorrows,
and my temptations were so great that I often thought I should
have despaired, I was so tempted. But when Christ opened to me how
he was tempted by the same devil, and had overcome him, and had
bruised his head; and that through him and his power, life, grace,
and spirit, I should overcome also, I had confidence in him. If I
had had a king’s diet, palace, and attendance, all would have been
as nothing; for nothing gave me comfort but the Lord by his power.
I saw professors, priests, and people were whole and at ease in
that condition which was my misery, and they loved that which I
would have been rid of. But the Lord did stay my desires upon
himself, and my care was cast upon him alone.”(197)

A genuine first‐hand religious experience like this is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which in purer days it drew its own supply of inspiration. Unless, indeed, by adopting new movements of the spirit it can make capital out of them and use them for its selfish corporate designs! Of protective action of this politic sort, promptly or tardily decided on, the dealings of the Roman ecclesiasticism with many individual saints and prophets yield examples enough for our instruction.

The plain fact is that men’s minds are built, as has been often said, in water‐tight compartments. Religious after a fashion, they yet have many other things in them beside their religion, and unholy entanglements and associations inevitably obtain. The basenesses so commonly charged to religion’s account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable at all to religion proper, but rather to religion’s wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion. And the bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeable to religion’s wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic dominion, the passion for laying down the law in the form of an absolutely closed‐in theoretic system. The ecclesiastical spirit in general is the sum of these two spirits of dominion; and I beseech you never to confound the phenomena of mere tribal or corporate psychology which it presents with those manifestations of the purely interior life which are the exclusive object of our study. The baiting of Jews, the hunting of Albigenses and Waldenses, the stoning of Quakers and ducking of Methodists, the murdering of Mormons and the massacring of Armenians, express much rather that aboriginal human neophobia, that pugnacity of which we all share the vestiges, and that inborn hatred of the alien and of eccentric and non‐conforming men as aliens, than they express the positive piety of the various perpetrators. Piety is the mask, the inner force is tribal instinct. You believe as little as I do, in spite of the Christian unction with which the German emperor addressed his troops upon their way to China, that the conduct which he suggested, and in which other Christian armies went beyond them, had anything whatever to do with the interior religious life of those concerned in the performance.

Well, no more for past atrocities than for this atrocity should we make piety responsible. At most we may blame piety for not availing to check our natural passions, and sometimes for supplying them with hypocritical pretexts. But hypocrisy also imposes obligations, and with the pretext usually couples some restriction; and when the passion gust is over, the piety may bring a reaction of repentance which the irreligious natural man would not have shown.

For many of the historic aberrations which have been laid to her charge, religion as such, then, is not to blame. Yet of the charge that over‐ zealousness or fanaticism is one of her liabilities we cannot wholly acquit her, so I will next make a remark upon that point. But I will preface it by a preliminary remark which connects itself with much that follows.

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Our survey of the phenomena of saintliness has unquestionably produced in your minds an impression of extravagance. Is it necessary, some of you have asked, as one example after another came before us, to be quite so fantastically good as that? We who have no vocation for the extremer ranges of sanctity will surely be let off at the last day if our humility, asceticism, and devoutness prove of a less convulsive sort. This practically amounts to saying that much that it is legitimate to admire in this field need nevertheless not be imitated, and that religious phenomena, like all other human phenomena, are subject to the law of the golden mean. Political reformers accomplish their successive tasks in the history of nations by being blind for the time to other causes. Great schools of art work out the effects which it is their mission to reveal, at the cost of a one‐sidedness for which other schools must make amends. We accept a John Howard, a Mazzini, a Botticelli, a Michael Angelo, with a kind of indulgence. We are glad they existed to show us that way, but we are glad there are also other ways of seeing and taking life. So of many of the saints whom we have looked at. We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example. The conduct we blame ourselves for not following lies nearer to the middle line of human effort. It is less dependent on particular beliefs and doctrines. It is such as wears well in different ages, such as under different skies all judges are able to commend.

The fruits of religion, in other words, are, like all human products, liable to corruption by excess. Common sense must judge them. It need not blame the votary; but it may be able to praise him only conditionally, as one who acts faithfully according to his lights. He shows us heroism in one way, but the unconditionally good way is that for which no indulgence need be asked.

We find that error by excess is exemplified by every saintly virtue. Excess, in human faculties, means usually one‐sidedness or want of balance; for it is hard to imagine an essential faculty too strong, if only other faculties equally strong be there to coöperate with it in action. Strong affections need a strong will; strong active powers need a strong intellect; strong intellect needs strong sympathies, to keep life steady. If the balance exist, no one faculty can possibly be too strong—we only get the stronger all‐round character. In the life of saints, technically so called, the spiritual faculties are strong, but what gives the impression of extravagance proves usually on examination to be a relative deficiency of intellect. Spiritual excitement takes pathological forms whenever other interests are too few and the intellect too narrow. We find this exemplified by all the saintly attributes in turn—devout love of God, purity, charity, asceticism, all may lead astray. I will run over these virtues in succession.

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First of all let us take Devoutness. When unbalanced, one of its vices is called Fanaticism. Fanaticism (when not a mere expression of ecclesiastical ambition) is only loyalty carried to a convulsive extreme. When an intensely loyal and narrow mind is once grasped by the feeling that a certain superhuman person is worthy of its exclusive devotion, one of the first things that happens is that it idealizes the devotion itself. To adequately realize the merits of the idol gets to be considered the one great merit of the worshiper; and the sacrifices and servilities by which savage tribesmen have from time immemorial exhibited their faithfulness to chieftains are now outbid in favor of the deity. Vocabularies are exhausted and languages altered in the attempt to praise him enough; death is looked on as gain if it attract his grateful notice; and the personal attitude of being his devotee becomes what one might almost call a new and exalted kind of professional specialty within the tribe.(198) The legends that gather round the lives of holy persons are fruits of this impulse to celebrate and glorify. The Buddha(199) and Mohammed(200) and their companions and many Christian saints are incrusted with a heavy jewelry of anecdotes which are meant to be honorific, but are simply _abgeschmackt_ and silly, and form a touching expression of man’s misguided propensity to praise.

An immediate consequence of this condition of mind is jealousy for the deity’s honor. How can the devotee show his loyalty better than by sensitiveness in this regard? The slightest affront or neglect must be resented, the deity’s enemies must be put to shame. In exceedingly narrow minds and active wills, such a care may become an engrossing preoccupation; and crusades have been preached and massacres instigated for no other reason than to remove a fancied slight upon the God. Theologies representing the gods as mindful of their glory, and churches with imperialistic policies, have conspired to fan this temper to a glow, so that intolerance and persecution have come to be vices associated by some of us inseparably with the saintly mind. They are unquestionably its besetting sins. The saintly temper is a moral temper, and a moral temper has often to be cruel. It is a partisan temper, and that is cruel. Between his own and Jehovah’s enemies a David knows no difference; a Catherine of Siena, panting to stop the warfare among Christians which was the scandal of her epoch, can think of no better method of union among them than a crusade to massacre the Turks; Luther finds no word of protest or regret over the atrocious tortures with which the Anabaptist leaders were put to death; and a Cromwell praises the Lord for delivering his enemies into his hands for “execution.” Politics come in in all such cases; but piety finds the partnership not quite unnatural. So, when “freethinkers” tell us that religion and fanaticism are twins, we cannot make an unqualified denial of the charge.

Fanaticism must then be inscribed on the wrong side of religion’s account, so long as the religious person’s intellect is on the stage which the despotic kind of God satisfies. But as soon as the God is represented as less intent on his own honor and glory, it ceases to be a danger.

Fanaticism is found only where the character is masterful and aggressive. In gentle characters, where devoutness is intense and the intellect feeble, we have an imaginative absorption in the love of God to the exclusion of all practical human interests, which, though innocent enough, is too one‐sided to be admirable. A mind too narrow has room but for one kind of affection. When the love of God takes possession of such a mind, it expels all human loves and human uses. There is no English name for such a sweet excess of devotion, so I will refer to it as a _theopathic_ condition.

The blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque may serve as an example.

“To be loved here upon the earth,” her recent biographer exclaims:
“to be loved by a noble, elevated, distinguished being; to be
loved with fidelity, with devotion,—what enchantment! But to be
loved by God! and loved by him to distraction [aimé jusqù’à la
folie]!—Margaret melted away with love at the thought of such a
thing. Like Saint Philip of Neri in former times, or like Saint
Francis Xavier, she said to God: ‘Hold back, O my God, these
torrents which overwhelm me, or else enlarge my capacity for their
reception.’ ”(201)

The most signal proofs of God’s love which Margaret Mary received
were her hallucinations of sight, touch, and hearing, and the most
signal in turn of these were the revelations of Christ’s sacred
heart, “surrounded with rays more brilliant than the Sun, and
transparent like a crystal. The wound which he received on the
cross visibly appeared upon it. There was a crown of thorns round
about this divine Heart, and a cross above it.” At the same time
Christ’s voice told her that, unable longer to contain the flames
of his love for mankind, he had chosen her by a miracle to spread
the knowledge of them. He thereupon took out her mortal heart,
placed it inside of his own and inflamed it, and then replaced it
in her breast, adding: “Hitherto thou hast taken the name of my
slave, hereafter thou shalt be called the well‐beloved disciple of
my Sacred Heart.”

In a later vision the Saviour revealed to her in detail the “great
design” which he wished to establish through her instrumentality.
“I ask of thee to bring it about that every first Friday after the
week of holy Sacrament shall be made into a special holy day for
honoring my Heart by a general communion and by services intended
to make honorable amends for the indignities which it has
received. And I promise thee that my Heart will dilate to shed
with abundance the influences of its love upon all those who pay
to it these honors, or who bring it about that others do the
same.”

“This revelation,” says Mgr. Bougaud, “is unquestionably the most important of all the revelations which have illumined the Church since that of the Incarnation and of the Lord’s Supper.... After the Eucharist, the supreme effort of the Sacred Heart.”(202) Well, what were its good fruits for Margaret Mary’s life? Apparently little else but sufferings and prayers and absences of mind and swoons and ecstasies. She became increasingly useless about the convent, her absorption in Christ’s love,—

“which grew upon her daily, rendering her more and more incapable
of attending to external duties. They tried her in the infirmary,
but without much success, although her kindness, zeal, and
devotion were without bounds, and her charity rose to acts of such
a heroism that our readers would not bear the recital of them.
They tried her in the kitchen, but were forced to give it up as
hopeless—everything dropped out of her hands. The admirable
humility with which she made amends for her clumsiness could not
prevent this from being prejudicial to the order and regularity
which must always reign in a community. They put her in the
school, where the little girls cherished her, and cut pieces out
of her clothes [for relics] as if she were already a saint, but
where she was too absorbed inwardly to pay the necessary
attention. Poor dear sister, even less after her visions than
before them was she a denizen of earth, and they had to leave her
in her heaven.”(203)

Poor dear sister, indeed! Amiable and good, but so feeble of intellectual outlook that it would be too much to ask of us, with our Protestant and modern education, to feel anything but indulgent pity for the kind of saintship which she embodies. A lower example still of theopathic saintliness is that of Saint Gertrude, a Benedictine nun of the thirteenth century, whose “Revelations,” a well‐known mystical authority, consist mainly of proofs of Christ’s partiality for her undeserving person. Assurances of his love, intimacies and caresses and compliments of the most absurd and puerile sort, addressed by Christ to Gertrude as an individual, form the tissue of this paltry‐minded recital.(204) In reading such a narrative, we realize the gap between the thirteenth and the twentieth century, and we feel that saintliness of character may yield almost absolutely worthless fruits if it be associated with such inferior intellectual sympathies. What with science, idealism, and democracy, our own imagination has grown to need a God of an entirely different temperament from that Being interested exclusively in dealing out personal favors, with whom our ancestors were so contented. Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness; and even the best professional sainthood of former centuries, pent in as it is to such a conception, seems to us curiously shallow and unedifying.