Chapter III: Part 3

“I have several times within the past few years felt the so‐called
‘consciousness of a presence.’ The experiences which I have in
mind are clearly distinguishable from another kind of experience
which I have had very frequently, and which I fancy many persons
would also call the ‘consciousness of a presence.’ But the
difference for me between the two sets of experience is as great
as the difference between feeling a slight warmth originating I
know not where, and standing in the midst of a conflagration with
all the ordinary senses alert.

“It was about September, 1884, when I had the first experience. On
the previous night I had had, after getting into bed at my rooms
in College, a vivid tactile hallucination of being grasped by the
arm, which made me get up and search the room for an intruder; but
the sense of presence properly so called came on the next night.
After I had got into bed and blown out the candle, I lay awake
awhile thinking on the previous night’s experience, when suddenly
I _felt_ something come into the room and stay close to my bed. It
remained only a minute or two. I did not recognize it by any
ordinary sense, and yet there was a horribly unpleasant
‘sensation’ connected with it. It stirred something more at the
roots of my being than any ordinary perception. The feeling had
something of the quality of a very large tearing vital pain
spreading chiefly over the chest, but within the organism—and yet
the feeling was not _pain_ so much as _abhorrence_. At all events,
something was present with me, and I knew its presence far more
surely than I have ever known the presence of any fleshly living
creature. I was conscious of its departure as of its coming: an
almost instantaneously swift going through the door, and the
‘horrible sensation’ disappeared.

“On the third night when I retired my mind was absorbed in some
lectures which I was preparing, and I was still absorbed in these
when I became aware of the actual presence (though not of the
_coming_) of the thing that was there the night before, and of the
‘horrible sensation.’ I then mentally concentrated all my effort
to charge this ‘thing,’ if it was evil, to depart, if it was _not_
evil, to tell me who or what it was, and if it could not explain
itself, to go, and that I would compel it to go. It went as on the
previous night, and my body quickly recovered its normal state.

“On two other occasions in my life I have had precisely the same
‘horrible sensation.’ Once it lasted a full quarter of an hour. In
all three instances the certainty that there in outward space
there stood _something_ was indescribably _stronger_ than the
ordinary certainty of companionship when we are in the close
presence of ordinary living people. The something seemed close to
me, and intensely more real than any ordinary perception. Although
I felt it to be like unto myself, so to speak, or finite, small,
and distressful, as it were, I didn’t recognize it as any
individual being or person.”

Of course such an experience as this does not connect itself with the religious sphere. Yet it may upon occasion do so; and the same correspondent informs me that at more than one other conjuncture he had the sense of presence developed with equal intensity and abruptness, only then it was filled with a quality of joy.

“There was not a mere consciousness of something there, but fused
in the central happiness of it, a startling awareness of some
ineffable good. Not vague either, not like the emotional effect of
some poem, or scene, or blossom, of music, but the sure knowledge
of the close presence of a sort of mighty person, and after it
went, the memory persisted as the one perception of reality.
Everything else might be a dream, but not that.”

My friend, as it oddly happens, does not interpret these latter experiences theistically, as signifying the presence of God. But it would clearly not have been unnatural to interpret them as a revelation of the deity’s existence. When we reach the subject of mysticism, we shall have much more to say upon this head.

Lest the oddity of these phenomena should disconcert you, I will venture to read you a couple of similar narratives, much shorter, merely to show that we are dealing with a well‐marked natural kind of fact. In the first case, which I take from the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, the sense of presence developed in a few moments into a distinctly visualized hallucination,—but I leave that part of the story out.

“I had read,” the narrator says, “some twenty minutes or so, was
thoroughly absorbed in the book, my mind was perfectly quiet, and
for the time being my friends were quite forgotten, when suddenly
without a moment’s warning my whole being seemed roused to the
highest state of tension or aliveness, and I was aware, with an
intenseness not easily imagined by those who had never experienced
it, that another being or presence was not only in the room, but
quite close to me. I put my book down, and although my excitement
was great, I felt quite collected, and not conscious of any sense
of fear. Without changing my position, and looking straight at the
fire, I knew somehow that my friend A. H. was standing at my left
elbow, but so far behind me as to be hidden by the armchair in
which I was leaning back. Moving my eyes round slightly without
otherwise changing my position, the lower portion of one leg
became visible, and I instantly recognized the gray‐blue material
of trousers he often wore, but the stuff appeared semi‐
transparent, reminding me of tobacco smoke in
consistency,”(25)—and hereupon the visual hallucination came.

Another informant writes:—

“Quite early in the night I was awakened.... I felt as if I had
been aroused intentionally, and at first thought some one was
breaking into the house.... I then turned on my side to go to
sleep again, and immediately felt a consciousness of a presence in
the room, and singular to state, it was not the consciousness of a
live person, but of a spiritual presence. This may provoke a
smile, but I can only tell you the facts as they occurred to me. I
do not know how to better describe my sensations than by simply
stating that I felt a consciousness of a spiritual presence.... I
felt also at the same time a strong feeling of superstitious
dread, as if something strange and fearful were about to
happen.”(26)

Professor Flournoy of Geneva gives me the following testimony of a friend of his, a lady, who has the gift of automatic or involuntary writing:—

“Whenever I practice automatic writing, what makes me feel that it
is not due to a subconscious self is the feeling I always have of
a foreign presence, external to my body. It is sometimes so
definitely characterized that I could point to its exact position.
This impression of presence is impossible to describe. It varies
in intensity and clearness according to the personality from whom
the writing professes to come. If it is some one whom I love, I
feel it immediately, before any writing has come. My heart seems
to recognize it.”

In an earlier book of mine I have cited at full length a curious case of presence felt by a blind man. The presence was that of the figure of a gray‐bearded man dressed in a pepper and salt suit, squeezing himself under the crack of the door and moving across the floor of the room towards a sofa. The blind subject of this quasi‐hallucination is an exceptionally intelligent reporter. He is entirely without internal visual imagery and cannot represent light or colors to himself, and is positive that his other senses, hearing, etc., were not involved in this false perception. It seems to have been an abstract conception rather, with the feelings of reality and spatial outwardness directly attached to it—in other words, a fully objectified and exteriorized _idea_.

Such cases, taken along with others which would be too tedious for quotation, seem sufficiently to prove the existence in our mental machinery of a sense of present reality more diffused and general than that which our special senses yield. For the psychologists the tracing of the organic seat of such a feeling would form a pretty problem—nothing could be more natural than to connect it with the muscular sense, with the feeling that our muscles were innervating themselves for action. Whatsoever thus innervated our activity, or “made our flesh creep,”—our senses are what do so oftenest,—might then appear real and present, even though it were but an abstract idea. But with such vague conjectures we have no concern at present, for our interest lies with the faculty rather than with its organic seat.

Like all positive affections of consciousness, the sense of reality has its negative counterpart in the shape of a feeling of unreality by which persons may be haunted, and of which one sometimes hears complaint:—

“When I reflect on the fact that I have made my appearance by
accident upon a globe itself whirled through space as the sport of
the catastrophes of the heavens,” says Madame Ackermann; “when I
see myself surrounded by beings as ephemeral and incomprehensible
as I am myself, and all excitedly pursuing pure chimeras, I
experience a strange feeling of being in a dream. It seems to me
as if I have loved and suffered and that erelong I shall die, in a
dream. My last word will be, ‘I have been dreaming.’ ”(27)

In another lecture we shall see how in morbid melancholy this sense of the unreality of things may become a carking pain, and even lead to suicide.

We may now lay it down as certain that in the distinctively religious sphere of experience, many persons (how many we cannot tell) possess the objects of their belief, not in the form of mere conceptions which their intellect accepts as true, but rather in the form of quasi‐sensible realities directly apprehended. As his sense of the real presence of these objects fluctuates, so the believer alternates between warmth and coldness in his faith. Other examples will bring this home to one better than abstract description, so I proceed immediately to cite some. The first example is a negative one, deploring the loss of the sense in question. I have extracted it from an account given me by a scientific man of my acquaintance, of his religious life. It seems to me to show clearly that the feeling of reality may be something more like a sensation than an intellectual operation properly so‐called.

“Between twenty and thirty I gradually became more and more
agnostic and irreligious, yet I cannot say that I ever lost that
‘indefinite consciousness’ which Herbert Spencer describes so
well, of an Absolute Reality behind phenomena. For me this Reality
was not the pure Unknowable of Spencer’s philosophy, for although
I had ceased my childish prayers to God, and never prayed to _It_
in a formal manner, yet my more recent experience shows me to have
been in a relation to _It_ which practically was the same thing as
prayer. Whenever I had any trouble, especially when I had conflict
with other people, either domestically or in the way of business,
or when I was depressed in spirits or anxious about affairs, I now
recognize that I used to fall back for support upon this curious
relation I felt myself to be in to this fundamental cosmical _It_.
It was on my side, or I was on Its side, however you please to
term it, in the particular trouble, and it always strengthened me
and seemed to give me endless vitality to feel its underlying and
supporting presence. In fact, it was an unfailing fountain of
living justice, truth, and strength, to which I instinctively
turned at times of weakness, and it always brought me out. I know
now that it was a personal relation I was in to it, because of
late years the power of communicating with it has left me, and I
am conscious of a perfectly definite loss. I used never to fail to
find it when I turned to it. Then came a set of years when
sometimes I found it, and then again I would be wholly unable to
make connection with it. I remember many occasions on which at
night in bed, I would be unable to get to sleep on account of
worry. I turned this way and that in the darkness, and groped
mentally for the familiar sense of that higher mind of my mind
which had always seemed to be close at hand as it were, closing
the passage, and yielding support, but there was no electric
current. A blank was there instead of _It_: I couldn’t find
anything. Now, at the age of nearly fifty, my power of getting
into connection with it has entirely left me; and I have to
confess that a great help has gone out of my life. Life has become
curiously dead and indifferent; and I can now see that my old
experience was probably exactly the same thing as the prayers of
the orthodox, only I did not call them by that name. What I have
spoken of as ‘It’ was practically not Spencer’s Unknowable, but
just my own instinctive and individual God, whom I relied upon for
higher sympathy, but whom somehow I have lost.”

Nothing is more common in the pages of religious biography than the way in which seasons of lively and of difficult faith are described as alternating. Probably every religious person has the recollection of particular crises in which a directer vision of the truth, a direct perception, perhaps, of a living God’s existence, swept in and overwhelmed the languor of the more ordinary belief. In James Russell Lowell’s correspondence there is a brief memorandum of an experience of this kind:—

“I had a revelation last Friday evening. I was at Mary’s, and
happening to say something of the presence of spirits (of whom, I
said, I was often dimly aware), Mr. Putnam entered into an
argument with me on spiritual matters. As I was speaking, the
whole system rose up before me like a vague destiny looming from
the Abyss. I never before so clearly felt the Spirit of God in me
and around me. The whole room seemed to me full of God. The air
seemed to waver to and fro with the presence of Something I knew
not what. I spoke with the calmness and clearness of a prophet. I
cannot tell you what this revelation was. I have not yet studied
it enough. But I shall perfect it one day, and then you shall hear
it and acknowledge its grandeur.”(28)

Here is a longer and more developed experience from a manuscript communication by a clergyman,—I take it from Starbuck’s manuscript collection:—

“I remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hilltop,
where my soul opened out, as it were, into the Infinite, and there
was a rushing together of the two worlds, the inner and the outer.
It was deep calling unto deep,—the deep that my own struggle had
opened up within being answered by the unfathomable deep without,
reaching beyond the stars. I stood alone with Him who had made me,
and all the beauty of the world, and love, and sorrow, and even
temptation. I did not seek Him, but felt the perfect unison of my
spirit with His. The ordinary sense of things around me faded. For
the moment nothing but an ineffable joy and exaltation remained.
It is impossible fully to describe the experience. It was like the
effect of some great orchestra when all the separate notes have
melted into one swelling harmony that leaves the listener
conscious of nothing save that his soul is being wafted upwards,
and almost bursting with its own emotion. The perfect stillness of
the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held
a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I
could not any more have doubted that _He_ was there than that I
was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of
the two.

“My highest faith in God and truest idea of him were then born in
me. I have stood upon the Mount of Vision since, and felt the
Eternal round about me. But never since has there come quite the
same stirring of the heart. Then, if ever, I believe, I stood face
to face with God, and was born anew of his spirit. There was, as I
recall it, no sudden change of thought or of belief, except that
my early crude conception had, as it were, burst into flower.
There was no destruction of the old, but a rapid, wonderful
unfolding. Since that time no discussion that I have heard of the
proofs of God’s existence has been able to shake my faith. Having
once felt the presence of God’s spirit, I have never lost it again
for long. My most assuring evidence of his existence is deeply
rooted in that hour of vision, in the memory of that supreme
experience, and in the conviction, gained from reading and
reflection, that something the same has come to all who have found
God. I am aware that it may justly be called mystical. I am not
enough acquainted with philosophy to defend it from that or any
other charge. I feel that in writing of it I have overlaid it with
words rather than put it clearly to your thought. But, such as it
is, I have described it as carefully as I now am able to do.”

Here is another document, even more definite in character, which, the writer being a Swiss, I translate from the French original.(29)

“I was in perfect health: we were on our sixth day of tramping,
and in good training. We had come the day before from Sixt to
Trient by Buet. I felt neither fatigue, hunger, nor thirst, and my
state of mind was equally healthy. I had had at Forlaz good news
from home; I was subject to no anxiety, either near or remote, for
we had a good guide, and there was not a shadow of uncertainty
about the road we should follow. I can best describe the condition
in which I was by calling it a state of equilibrium. When all at
once I experienced a feeling of being raised above myself, I felt
the presence of God—I tell of the thing just as I was conscious of
it—as if his goodness and his power were penetrating me
altogether. The throb of emotion was so violent that I could
barely tell the boys to pass on and not wait for me. I then sat
down on a stone, unable to stand any longer, and my eyes
overflowed with tears. I thanked God that in the course of my life
he had taught me to know him, that he sustained my life and took
pity both on the insignificant creature and on the sinner that I
was. I begged him ardently that my life might be consecrated to
the doing of his will. I felt his reply, which was that I should
do his will from day to day, in humility and poverty, leaving him,
the Almighty God, to be judge of whether I should some time be
called to bear witness more conspicuously. Then, slowly, the
ecstasy left my heart; that is, I felt that God had withdrawn the
communion which he had granted, and I was able to walk on, but
very slowly, so strongly was I still possessed by the interior
emotion. Besides, I had wept uninterruptedly for several minutes,
my eyes were swollen, and I did not wish my companions to see me.
The state of ecstasy may have lasted four or five minutes,
although it seemed at the time to last much longer. My comrades
waited for me ten minutes at the cross of Barine, but I took about
twenty‐five or thirty minutes to join them, for as well as I can
remember, they said that I had kept them back for about half an
hour. The impression had been so profound that in climbing slowly
the slope I asked myself if it were possible that Moses on Sinai
could have had a more intimate communication with God. I think it
well to add that in this ecstasy of mine God had neither form,
color, odor, nor taste; moreover, that the feeling of his presence
was accompanied with no determinate localization. It was rather as
if my personality had been transformed by the presence of a
_spiritual spirit_. But the more I seek words to express this
intimate intercourse, the more I feel the impossibility of
describing the thing by any of our usual images. At bottom the
expression most apt to render what I felt is this: God was
present, though invisible; he fell under no one of my senses, yet
my consciousness perceived him.”

The adjective “mystical” is technically applied, most often, to states that are of brief duration. Of course such hours of rapture as the last two persons describe are mystical experiences, of which in a later lecture I shall have much to say. Meanwhile here is the abridged record of another mystical or semi‐mystical experience, in a mind evidently framed by nature for ardent piety. I owe it to Starbuck’s collection. The lady who gives the account is the daughter of a man well known in his time as a writer against Christianity. The suddenness of her conversion shows well how native the sense of God’s presence must be to certain minds. She relates that she was brought up in entire ignorance of Christian doctrine, but, when in Germany, after being talked to by Christian friends, she read the Bible and prayed, and finally the plan of salvation flashed upon her like a stream of light.

“To this day,” she writes, “I cannot understand dallying with
religion and the commands of God. The very instant I heard my
Father’s cry calling unto me, my heart bounded in recognition. I
ran, I stretched forth my arms, I cried aloud, ‘Here, here I am,
my Father.’ Oh, happy child, what should I do? ‘Love me,’ answered
my God. ‘I do, I do,’ I cried passionately. ‘Come unto me,’ called
my Father. ‘I will,’ my heart panted. Did I stop to ask a single
question? Not one. It never occurred to me to ask whether I was
good enough, or to hesitate over my unfitness, or to find out what
I thought of his church, or ... to wait until I should be
satisfied. Satisfied! I was satisfied. Had I not found my God and
my Father? Did he not love me? Had he not called me? Was there not
a Church into which I might enter?... Since then I have had direct
answers to prayer—so significant as to be almost like talking with
God and hearing his answer. The idea of God’s reality has never
left me for one moment.”

Here is still another case, the writer being a man aged twenty‐seven, in which the experience, probably almost as characteristic, is less vividly described:—

“I have on a number of occasions felt that I had enjoyed a period
of intimate communion with the divine. These meetings came unasked
and unexpected, and seemed to consist merely in the temporary
obliteration of the conventionalities which usually surround and
cover my life.... Once it was when from the summit of a high
mountain I looked over a gashed and corrugated landscape extending
to a long convex of ocean that ascended to the horizon, and again
from the same point when I could see nothing beneath me but a
boundless expanse of white cloud, on the blown surface of which a
few high peaks, including the one I was on, seemed plunging about
as if they were dragging their anchors. What I felt on these
occasions was a temporary loss of my own identity, accompanied by
an illumination which revealed to me a deeper significance than I
had been wont to attach to life. It is in this that I find my
justification for saying that I have enjoyed communication with
God. Of course the absence of such a being as this would be chaos.
I cannot conceive of life without its presence.”

Of the more habitual and so to speak chronic sense of God’s presence the following sample from Professor Starbuck’s manuscript collection may serve to give an idea. It is from a man aged forty‐nine,—probably thousands of unpretending Christians would write an almost identical account.

“God is more real to me than any thought or thing or person. I
feel his presence positively, and the more as I live in closer
harmony with his laws as written in my body and mind. I feel him
in the sunshine or rain; and awe mingled with a delicious
restfulness most nearly describes my feelings. I talk to him as to
a companion in prayer and praise, and our communion is delightful.
He answers me again and again, often in words so clearly spoken
that it seems my outer ear must have carried the tone, but
generally in strong mental impressions. Usually a text of
Scripture, unfolding some new view of him and his love for me, and
care for my safety. I could give hundreds of instances, in school
matters, social problems, financial difficulties, etc. That he is
mine and I am his never leaves me, it is an abiding joy. Without
it life would be a blank, a desert, a shoreless, trackless waste.”

I subjoin some more examples from writers of different ages and sexes. They are also from Professor Starbuck’s collection, and their number might be greatly multiplied. The first is from a man twenty‐seven years old:—

“God is quite real to me. I talk to him and often get answers.
Thoughts sudden and distinct from any I have been entertaining
come to my mind after asking God for his direction. Something over
a year ago I was for some weeks in the direst perplexity. When the
trouble first appeared before me I was dazed, but before long (two
or three hours) I could hear distinctly a passage of Scripture:
‘My grace is sufficient for thee.’ Every time my thoughts turned
to the trouble I could hear this quotation. I don’t think I ever
doubted the existence of God, or had him drop out of my
consciousness. God has frequently stepped into my affairs very
perceptibly, and I feel that he directs many little details all
the time. But on two or three occasions he has ordered ways for me
very contrary to my ambitions and plans.”

Another statement (none the less valuable psychologically for being so decidedly childish) is that of a boy of seventeen:—

“Sometimes as I go to church, I sit down, join in the service, and
before I go out I feel as if God was with me, right side of me,
singing and reading the Psalms with me.... And then again I feel
as if I could sit beside him, and put my arms around him, kiss
him, etc. When I am taking Holy Communion at the altar, I try to
get with him and generally feel his presence.”

I let a few other cases follow at random:—

“God surrounds me like the physical atmosphere. He is closer to me
than my own breath. In him literally I live and move and have my
being.”—

“There are times when I seem to stand, in his very presence, to
talk with him. Answers to prayer have come, sometimes direct and
overwhelming in their revelation of his presence and powers. There
are times when God seems far off, but this is always my own
fault.”—

“I have the sense of a presence, strong, and at the same time
soothing, which hovers over me. Sometimes it seems to enwrap me
with sustaining arms.”

Such is the human ontological imagination, and such is the convincingness of what it brings to birth. Unpicturable beings are realized, and realized with an intensity almost like that of an hallucination. They determine our vital attitude as decisively as the vital attitude of lovers is determined by the habitual sense, by which each is haunted, of the other being in the world. A lover has notoriously this sense of the continuous being of his idol, even when his attention is addressed to other matters and he no longer represents her features. He cannot forget her; she uninterruptedly affects him through and through.

I spoke of the convincingness of these feelings of reality, and I must dwell a moment longer on that point. They are as convincing to those who have them as any direct sensible experiences can be, and they are, as a rule, much more convincing than results established by mere logic ever are. One may indeed be entirely without them; probably more than one of you here present is without them in any marked degree; but if you do have them, and have them at all strongly, the probability is that you cannot help regarding them as genuine perceptions of truth, as revelations of a kind of reality which no adverse argument, however unanswerable by you in words, can expel from your belief. The opinion opposed to mysticism in philosophy is sometimes spoken of as _rationalism_. Rationalism insists that all our beliefs ought ultimately to find for themselves articulate grounds. Such grounds, for rationalism, must consist of four things: (1) definitely statable abstract principles; (2) definite facts of sensation; (3) definite hypotheses based on such facts; and (4) definite inferences logically drawn. Vague impressions of something indefinable have no place in the rationalistic system, which on its positive side is surely a splendid intellectual tendency, for not only are all our philosophies fruits of it, but physical science (amongst other good things) is its result.

Nevertheless, if we look on man’s whole mental life as it exists, on the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science, and that they inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial. It is the part that has the _prestige_ undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same, if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions. If you have intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which rationalism inhabits. Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely _knows_ that that result must be truer than any logic‐chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it. This inferiority of the rationalistic level in founding belief is just as manifest when rationalism argues for religion as when it argues against it. That vast literature of proofs of God’s existence drawn from the order of nature, which a century ago seemed so overwhelmingly convincing, to‐day does little more than gather dust in libraries, for the simple reason that our generation has ceased to believe in the kind of God it argued for. Whatever sort of a being God may be, we _know_ to‐day that he is nevermore that mere external inventor of “contrivances” intended to make manifest his “glory” in which our great‐grandfathers took such satisfaction, though just how we know this we cannot possibly make clear by words either to others or to ourselves. I defy any of you here fully to account for your persuasion that if a God exist he must be a more cosmic and tragic personage than that Being.

The truth is that in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion. Then, indeed, our intuitions and our reason work together, and great world‐ruling systems, like that of the Buddhist or of the Catholic philosophy, may grow up. Our impulsive belief is here always what sets up the original body of truth, and our articulately verbalized philosophy is but its showy translation into formulas. The unreasoned and immediate assurance is the deep thing in us, the reasoned argument is but a surface exhibition. Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow. If a person feels the presence of a living God after the fashion shown by my quotations, your critical arguments, be they never so superior, will vainly set themselves to change his faith.

Please observe, however, that I do not yet say that it is _better_ that the subconscious and non‐rational should thus hold primacy in the religious realm. I confine myself to simply pointing out that they do so hold it as a matter of fact.

So much for our sense of the reality of the religious objects. Let me now say a brief word more about the attitudes they characteristically awaken.

We have already agreed that they are _solemn_; and we have seen reason to think that the most distinctive of them is the sort of joy which may result in extreme cases from absolute self‐surrender. The sense of the kind of object to which the surrender is made has much to do with determining the precise complexion of the joy; and the whole phenomenon is more complex than any simple formula allows. In the literature of the subject, sadness and gladness have each been emphasized in turn. The ancient saying that the first maker of the Gods was fear receives voluminous corroboration from every age of religious history; but none the less does religious history show the part which joy has evermore tended to play. Sometimes the joy has been primary; sometimes secondary, being the gladness of deliverance from the fear. This latter state of things, being the more complex, is also the more complete; and as we proceed, I think we shall have abundant reason for refusing to leave out either the sadness or the gladness, if we look at religion with the breadth of view which it demands. Stated in the completest possible terms, a man’s religion involves both moods of contraction and moods of expansion of his being. But the quantitative mixture and order of these moods vary so much from one age of the world, from one system of thought, and from one individual to another, that you may insist either on the dread and the submission, or on the peace and the freedom as the essence of the matter, and still remain materially within the limits of the truth. The constitutionally sombre and the constitutionally sanguine onlooker are bound to emphasize opposite aspects of what lies before their eyes.

The constitutionally sombre religious person makes even of his religious peace a very sober thing. Danger still hovers in the air about it. Flexion and contraction are not wholly checked. It were sparrowlike and childish after our deliverance to explode into twittering laughter and caper‐ cutting, and utterly to forget the imminent hawk on bough. Lie low, rather, lie low; for you are in the hands of a living God. In the Book of Job, for example, the impotence of man and the omnipotence of God is the exclusive burden of its author’s mind. “It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do?—deeper than hell; what canst thou know?” There is an astringent relish about the truth of this conviction which some men can feel, and which for them is as near an approach as can be made to the feeling of religious joy.

“In Job,” says that coldly truthful writer, the author of Mark
Rutherford, “God reminds us that man is not the measure of his
creation. The world is immense, constructed on no plan or theory
which the intellect of man can grasp. It is _transcendent_
everywhere. This is the burden of every verse, and is the secret,
if there be one, of the poem. Sufficient or insufficient, there is
nothing more.... God is great, we know not his ways. He takes from
us all we have, but yet if we possess our souls in patience, we
_may_ pass the valley of the shadow, and come out in sunlight
again. We may or we may not!... What more have we to say now than
God said from the whirlwind over two thousand five hundred years
ago?”(30)

If we turn to the sanguine onlooker, on the other hand, we find that deliverance is felt as incomplete unless the burden be altogether overcome and the danger forgotten. Such onlookers give us definitions that seem to the sombre minds of whom we have just been speaking to leave out all the solemnity that makes religious peace so different from merely animal joys. In the opinion of some writers an attitude might be called religious, though no touch were left in it of sacrifice or submission, no tendency to flexion, no bowing of the head. Any “habitual and regulated admiration,” says Professor J. R. Seeley,(31) “is worthy to be called a religion”; and accordingly he thinks that our Music, our Science, and our so‐called “Civilization,” as these things are now organized and admiringly believed in, form the more genuine religions of our time. Certainly the unhesitating and unreasoning way in which we feel that we must inflict our civilization upon “lower” races, by means of Hotchkiss guns, etc., reminds one of nothing so much as of the early spirit of Islam spreading its religion by the sword.

In my last lecture I quoted to you the ultra‐radical opinion of Mr. Havelock Ellis, that laughter of any sort may be considered a religious exercise, for it bears witness to the soul’s emancipation. I quoted this opinion in order to deny its adequacy. But we must now settle our scores more carefully with this whole optimistic way of thinking. It is far too complex to be decided off‐hand. I propose accordingly that we make of religious optimism the theme of the next two lectures.

LECTURES IV AND V. THE RELIGION OF HEALTHY‐MINDEDNESS.

If we were to ask the question: “What is human life’s chief concern?” one of the answers we should receive would be: “It is happiness.” How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure. The hedonistic school in ethics deduces the moral life wholly from the experiences of happiness and unhappiness which different kinds of conduct bring; and, even more in the religious life than in the moral life, happiness and unhappiness seem to be the poles round which the interest revolves. We need not go so far as to say with the author whom I lately quoted that any persistent enthusiasm is, as such, religion, nor need we call mere laughter a religious exercise; but we must admit that any persistent enjoyment may _produce_ the sort of religion which consists in a grateful admiration of the gift of so happy an existence; and we must also acknowledge that the more complex ways of experiencing religion are new manners of producing happiness, wonderful inner paths to a supernatural kind of happiness, when the first gift of natural existence is unhappy, as it so often proves itself to be.

With such relations between religion and happiness, it is perhaps not surprising that men come to regard the happiness which a religious belief affords as a proof of its truth. If a creed makes a man feel happy, he almost inevitably adopts it. Such a belief ought to be true; therefore it is true—such, rightly or wrongly, is one of the “immediate inferences” of the religious logic used by ordinary men.

“The near presence of God’s spirit,” says a German writer,(32)
“may be experienced in its reality—indeed _only_ experienced. And
the mark by which the spirit’s existence and nearness are made
irrefutably clear to those who have ever had the experience is the
utterly incomparable _feeling of happiness_ which is connected
with the nearness, and which is therefore not only a possible and
altogether proper feeling for us to have here below, but is the
best and most indispensable proof of God’s reality. No other proof
is equally convincing, and therefore happiness is the point from
which every efficacious new theology should start.”

In the hour immediately before us, I shall invite you to consider the simpler kinds of religious happiness, leaving the more complex sorts to be treated on a later day.

In many persons, happiness is congenital and irreclaimable. “Cosmic emotion” inevitably takes in them the form of enthusiasm and freedom. I speak not only of those who are animally happy. I mean those who, when unhappiness is offered or proposed to them, positively refuse to feel it, as if it were something mean and wrong. We find such persons in every age, passionately flinging themselves upon their sense of the goodness of life, in spite of the hardships of their own condition, and in spite of the sinister theologies into which they may be born. From the outset their religion is one of union with the divine. The heretics who went before the reformation are lavishly accused by the church writers of antinomian practices, just as the first Christians were accused of indulgence in orgies by the Romans. It is probable that there never has been a century in which the deliberate refusal to think ill of life has not been idealized by a sufficient number of persons to form sects, open or secret, who claimed all natural things to be permitted. Saint Augustine’s maxim, _Dilige et quod vis fac_,—if you but love [God], you may do as you incline,—is morally one of the profoundest of observations, yet it is pregnant, for such persons, with passports beyond the bounds of conventional morality. According to their characters they have been refined or gross; but their belief has been at all times systematic enough to constitute a definite religious attitude. God was for them a giver of freedom, and the sting of evil was overcome. Saint Francis and his immediate disciples were, on the whole, of this company of spirits, of which there are of course infinite varieties. Rousseau in the earlier years of his writing, Diderot, B. de Saint Pierre, and many of the leaders of the eighteenth century anti‐christian movement were of this optimistic type. They owed their influence to a certain authoritativeness in their feeling that Nature, if you will only trust her sufficiently, is absolutely good.

It is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhaps more often feminine than masculine, and young than old, whose soul is of this sky‐ blue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all enchanting innocencies than with dark human passions, who can think no ill of man or God, and in whom religious gladness, being in possession from the outset, needs no deliverance from any antecedent burden.

“God has two families of children on this earth,” says Francis W.
Newman,(33) “_the once‐born_ and _the twice‐born_,” and the once‐
born he describes as follows: “They see God, not as a strict
Judge, not as a Glorious Potentate; but as the animating Spirit of
a beautiful harmonious world, Beneficent and Kind, Merciful as
well as Pure. The same characters generally have no metaphysical
tendencies: they do not look back into themselves. Hence they are
not distressed by their own imperfections: yet it would be absurd
to call them self‐righteous; for they hardly think of themselves
_at all_. This childlike quality of their nature makes the opening
of religion very happy to them: for they no more shrink from God,
than a child from an emperor, before whom the parent trembles: in
fact, they have no vivid conception of _any_ of the qualities in
which the severer Majesty of God consists.(34) He is to them the
impersonation of Kindness and Beauty. They read his character, not
in the disordered world of man, but in romantic and harmonious
nature. Of human sin they know perhaps little in their own hearts
and not very much in the world; and human suffering does but melt
them to tenderness. Thus, when they approach God, no inward
disturbance ensues; and without being as yet spiritual, they have
a certain complacency and perhaps romantic sense of excitement in
their simple worship.”

In the Romish Church such characters find a more congenial soil to grow in than in Protestantism, whose fashions of feeling have been set by minds of a decidedly pessimistic order. But even in Protestantism they have been abundant enough; and in its recent “liberal” developments of Unitarianism and latitudinarianism generally, minds of this order have played and still are playing leading and constructive parts. Emerson himself is an admirable example. Theodore Parker is another,—here are a couple of characteristic passages from Parker’s correspondence.(35)

“Orthodox scholars say: ‘In the heathen classics you find no
consciousness of sin.’ It is very true—God be thanked for it. They
were conscious of wrath, of cruelty, avarice, drunkenness, lust,
sloth, cowardice, and other actual vices, and struggled and got
rid of the deformities, but they were not conscious of ‘enmity
against God,’ and didn’t sit down and whine and groan against non‐
existent evil. I have done wrong things enough in my life, and do
them now; I miss the mark, draw bow, and try again. But I am not
conscious of hating God, or man, or right, or love, and I know
there is much ‘health in me’; and in my body, even now, there
dwelleth many a good thing, spite of consumption and Saint Paul.”
In another letter Parker writes: “I have swum in clear sweet
waters all my days; and if sometimes they were a little cold, and
the stream ran adverse and something rough, it was never too
strong to be breasted and swum through. From the days of earliest
boyhood, when I went stumbling through the grass,... up to the
gray‐bearded manhood of this time, there is none but has left me
honey in the hive of memory that I now feed on for present
delight. When I recall the years ... I am filled with a sense of
sweetness and wonder that such little things can make a mortal so
exceedingly rich. But I must confess that the chiefest of all my
delights is still the religious.”

Another good expression of the “once‐born” type of consciousness, developing straight and natural, with no element of morbid compunction or crisis, is contained in the answer of Dr. Edward Everett Hale, the eminent Unitarian preacher and writer, to one of Dr. Starbuck’s circulars. I quote a part of it:—

“I observe, with profound regret, the religious struggles which
come into many biographies, as if almost essential to the
formation of the hero. I ought to speak of these, to say that any
man has an advantage, not to be estimated, who is born, as I was,
into a family where the religion is simple and rational; who is
trained in the theory of such a religion, so that he never knows,
for an hour, what these religious or irreligious struggles are. I
always knew God loved me, and I was always grateful to him for the
world he placed me in. I always liked to tell him so, and was
always glad to receive his suggestions to me.... I can remember
perfectly that when I was coming to manhood, the half‐
philosophical novels of the time had a deal to say about the young
men and maidens who were facing the ‘problem of life.’ I had no
idea whatever what the problem of life was. To live with all my
might seemed to me easy; to learn where there was so much to learn
seemed pleasant and almost of course; to lend a hand, if one had a
chance, natural; and if one did this, why, he enjoyed life because
he could not help it, and without proving to himself that he ought
to enjoy it.... A child who is early taught that he is God’s
child, that he may live and move and have his being in God, and
that he has, therefore, infinite strength at hand for the
conquering of any difficulty, will take life more easily, and
probably will make more of it, than one who is told that he is
born the child of wrath and wholly incapable of good.”(36)

One can but recognize in such writers as these the presence of a temperament organically weighted on the side of cheer and fatally forbidden to linger, as those of opposite temperament linger, over the darker aspects of the universe. In some individuals optimism may become quasi‐pathological. The capacity for even a transient sadness or a momentary humility seems cut off from them as by a kind of congenital anæsthesia.(37)

The supreme contemporary example of such an inability to feel evil is of course Walt Whitman.

“His favorite occupation,” writes his disciple, Dr. Bucke, “seemed
to be strolling or sauntering about outdoors by himself, looking
at the grass, the trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the
varying aspects of the sky, and listening to the birds, the
crickets, the tree frogs, and all the hundreds of natural sounds.
It was evident that these things gave him a pleasure far beyond
what they give to ordinary people. Until I knew the man,”
continues Dr. Bucke, “it had not occurred to me that any one could
derive so much absolute happiness from these things as he did. He
was very fond of flowers, either wild or cultivated; liked all
sorts. I think he admired lilacs and sunflowers just as much as
roses. Perhaps, indeed, no man who ever lived liked so many things
and disliked so few as Walt Whitman. All natural objects seemed to
have a charm for him. All sights and sounds seemed to please him.
He appeared to like (and I believe he did like) all the men,
women, and children he saw (though I never knew him to say that he
liked any one), but each who knew him felt that he liked him or
her, and that he liked others also. I never knew him to argue or
dispute, and he never spoke about money. He always justified,
sometimes playfully, sometimes quite seriously, those who spoke
harshly of himself or his writings, and I often thought he even
took pleasure in the opposition of enemies. When I first knew
[him], I used to think that he watched himself, and would not
allow his tongue to give expression to fretfulness, antipathy,
complaint, and remonstrance. It did not occur to me as possible
that these mental states could be absent in him. After long
observation, however, I satisfied myself that such absence or
unconsciousness was entirely real. He never spoke deprecatingly of
any nationality or class of men, or time in the world’s history,
or against any trades or occupations—not even against any animals,
insects, or inanimate things, nor any of the laws of nature, nor
any of the results of those laws, such as illness, deformity, and
death. He never complained or grumbled either at the weather,
pain, illness, or anything else. He never swore. He could not very
well, since he never spoke in anger and apparently never was
angry. He never exhibited fear, and I do not believe he ever felt
it.”(38)

Walt Whitman owes his importance in literature to the systematic expulsion from his writings of all contractile elements. The only sentiments he allowed himself to express were of the expansive order; and he expressed these in the first person, not as your mere monstrously conceited individual might so express them, but vicariously for all men, so that a passionate and mystic ontological emotion suffuses his words, and ends by persuading the reader that men and women, life and death, and all things are divinely good.

Thus it has come about that many persons to‐day regard Walt Whitman as the restorer of the eternal natural religion. He has infected them with his own love of comrades, with his own gladness that he and they exist. Societies are actually formed for his cult; a periodical organ exists for its propagation, in which the lines of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are already beginning to be drawn;(39) hymns are written by others in his peculiar prosody; and he is even explicitly compared with the founder of the Christian religion, not altogether to the advantage of the latter.

Whitman is often spoken of as a “pagan.” The word nowadays means sometimes the mere natural animal man without a sense of sin; sometimes it means a Greek or Roman with his own peculiar religious consciousness. In neither of these senses does it fitly define this poet. He is more than your mere animal man who has not tasted of the tree of good and evil. He is aware enough of sin for a swagger to be present in his indifference towards it, a conscious pride in his freedom from flexions and contractions, which your genuine pagan in the first sense of the word would never show.