Varieties of Religious Experience — Lecture 12 - Saintliness

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ So much for the human love aroused by the faith‐state.

Let me next speak of the Equanimity, Resignation, Fortitude, and Patience which it brings.

“A paradise of inward tranquillity” seems to be faith’s usual result; and it is easy, even without being religious one’s self, to understand this.

A

moment back, in treating of the sense of God’s presence, I spoke of the unaccountable feeling of safety which one may then have.

And, indeed, how can it possibly fail to steady the nerves, to cool the fever, and appease the fret, if one be sensibly conscious that, no matter what one’s difficulties for the moment may appear to be, one’s life as a whole is in the keeping of a power whom one can absolutely trust?

In deeply religious men the abandonment of self to this power is passionate.

Whoever not only says, but _feels_, “God’s will be done,” is mailed against every weakness;

and the whole historic array of martyrs, missionaries, and religious reformers is there to prove the tranquil‐mindedness, under naturally agitating or distressing circumstances, which self‐surrender brings.

The temper of the tranquil‐mindedness differs, of course, according as the person is of a constitutionally sombre or of a constitutionally cheerful cast of mind.

In the sombre it partakes more of resignation and submission; in the cheerful it is a joyous consent.

As an example of the former temper, I quote part of a letter from Professor Lagneau, a venerated teacher of philosophy who lately died, a great invalid, at Paris:— “My life, for the success of which you send good wishes, will be what it is able to be.

I ask nothing from it, I expect nothing from it.

For long years now I exist, think, and act, and am worth what I am worth, only through the despair which is my sole strength and my sole foundation.

May it preserve for me, even in these last trials to which I am coming, the courage to do without the desire of deliverance.

I ask nothing more from the Source whence all strength cometh, and if that is granted, your wishes will have been accomplished.

”(168) There is something pathetic and fatalistic about this, but the power of such a tone as a protection against outward shocks is manifest.

Pascal is another Frenchman of pessimistic natural temperament.

He expresses still more amply the temper of self‐surrendering submissiveness:— “Deliver me, Lord,” he writes in his prayers, “from the sadness at my proper suffering which self‐love might give, but put into me a sadness like your own.

Let my sufferings appease your choler.

Make them an occasion for my conversion and salvation.

I ask you neither for health nor for sickness, for life nor for death; but that you may dispose of my health and my sickness, my life and my death, for your glory, for my salvation, and for the use of the Church and of your saints, of whom I would by your grace be one.

You alone know what is expedient for me; you are the sovereign master; do with me according to your will.

Give to me, or take away from me, only conform my will to yours.

I know but one thing, Lord, that it is good to follow you, and bad to offend you.

Apart from that, I know not what is good or bad in anything.

I know not which is most profitable to me, health or sickness, wealth or poverty, nor anything else in the world.

That discernment is beyond the power of men or angels, and is hidden among the secrets of your Providence, which I adore, but do not seek to fathom.

”(169) When we reach more optimistic temperaments, the resignation grows less passive.

Examples are sown so broadcast throughout history that I might well pass on without citation.

As it is, I snatch at the first that occurs to my mind.

Madame Guyon, a frail creature physically, was yet of a happy native disposition.

She went through many perils with admirable serenity of soul.

After being sent to prison for heresy,— “Some of my friends,” she writes, “wept bitterly at the hearing of it, but such was my state of acquiescence and resignation that it failed to draw any tears from me....

There appeared to be in me then, as I find it to be in me now, such an entire loss of what regards myself, that any of my own interests gave me little pain or pleasure; ever wanting to will or wish for myself only the very thing which God does.

” In another place she writes: “We all of us came near perishing in a river which we found it necessary to pass.

The carriage sank in the quicksand.

Others who were with us threw themselves out in excessive fright.

But I found my thoughts so much taken up with God that I had no distinct sense of danger.

It is true that the thought of being drowned passed across my mind, but it cost no other sensation or reflection in me than this—that I felt quite contented and willing it were so, if it were my heavenly Father’s choice.

” Sailing from Nice to Genoa, a storm keeps her eleven days at sea.

“As the irritated waves dashed round us,” she writes, “I could not help experiencing a certain degree of satisfaction in my mind.

I pleased myself with thinking that those mutinous billows, under the command of Him who does all things rightly, might probably furnish me with a watery grave.

Perhaps I carried the point too far, in the pleasure which I took in thus seeing myself beaten and bandied by the swelling waters.

Those who were with me took notice of my intrepidity.

”(170) The contempt of danger which religious enthusiasm produces may be even more buoyant still.

I take an example from that charming recent autobiography, “With Christ at Sea,” by Frank Bullen.

A couple of days after he went through the conversion on shipboard of which he there gives an account,— “It was blowing stiffly,” he writes, “and we were carrying a press of canvas to get north out of the bad weather.

Shortly after four bells we hauled down the flying‐jib, and I sprang out astride the boom to furl it.

I was sitting astride the boom when suddenly it gave way with me.

The sail slipped through my fingers, and I fell backwards, hanging head downwards over the seething tumult of shining foam under the ship’s bows, suspended by one foot.

But I felt only high exultation in my certainty of eternal life.

Although death was divided from me by a hair’s breadth, and I was acutely conscious of the fact, it gave me no sensation but joy.

I

suppose I could have hung there no longer than five seconds, but in that time I lived a whole age of delight.

But my body asserted itself, and with a desperate gymnastic effort I regained the boom.

How I furled the sail I don’t know, but I sang at the utmost pitch of my voice praises to God that went pealing out over the dark waste of waters.

”(171) The annals of martyrdom are of course the signal field of triumph for religious imperturbability.

Let me cite as an example the statement of a humble sufferer, persecuted as a Huguenot under Louis XIV.

:— “They shut all the doors,” Blanche Gamond writes, “and I saw six women, each with a bunch of willow rods as thick as the hand could hold, and a yard long.

He gave me the order, ‘Undress yourself,’ which I did.

He said, ‘You are leaving on your shift; you must take it off.

’ They had so little patience that they took it off themselves, and I was naked from the waist up.

They brought a cord with which they tied me to a beam in the kitchen.

They drew the cord tight with all their strength and asked me, ‘Does it hurt you?

’ and then they discharged their fury upon me, exclaiming as they struck me, ‘Pray now to your God.

’ It was the Roulette woman who held this language.

But at this moment I received the greatest consolation that I can ever receive in my life, since I had the honor of being whipped for the name of Christ, and in addition of being crowned with his mercy and his consolations.

Why can I not write down the inconceivable influences, consolations, and peace which I felt interiorly?

To understand them one must have passed by the same trial; they were so great that I was ravished, for there where afflictions abound grace is given superabundantly.

In vain the women cried, ‘We must double our blows; she does not feel them, for she neither speaks nor cries.

’ And how should I have cried, since I was swooning with happiness within?

”(172) The transition from tenseness, self‐responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of the personal centre of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down.

This abandonment of self‐responsibility seems to be the fundamental act in specifically religious, as distinguished from moral practice.

It antedates theologies and is independent of philosophies.

Mind‐cure, theosophy, stoicism, ordinary neurological hygiene, insist on it as emphatically as Christianity does, and it is capable of entering into closest marriage with every speculative creed.

(173) Christians who have it strongly live in what is called “recollection,” and are never anxious about the future, nor worry over the outcome of the day.

Of Saint Catharine of Genoa it is said that “she took cognizance of things, only as they were presented to her in succession, _moment by moment_.

” To her holy soul, “the divine moment was the present moment,...

and when the present moment was estimated in itself and in its relations, and when the duty that was involved in it was accomplished, it was permitted to pass away as if it had never been, and to give way to the facts and duties of the moment which came after.

”(174) Hinduism, mind‐cure, and theosophy all lay great emphasis upon this concentration of the consciousness upon the moment at hand.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ The next religious symptom which I will note is what I have called Purity of Life.

The saintly person becomes exceedingly sensitive to inner inconsistency or discord, and mixture and confusion grow intolerable.

All the mind’s objects and occupations must be ordered with reference to the special spiritual excitement which is now its keynote.

Whatever is unspiritual taints the pure water of the soul and is repugnant.

Mixed with this exaltation of the moral sensibilities there is also an ardor of sacrifice, for the beloved deity’s sake, of everything unworthy of him.

Sometimes the spiritual ardor is so sovereign that purity is achieved at a stroke—we have seen examples.

Usually it is a more gradual conquest.

Billy Bray’s account of his abandonment of tobacco is a good example of the latter form of achievement.

“I had been a smoker as well as a drunkard, and I used to love my tobacco as much as I loved my meat, and I would rather go down into the mine without my dinner than without my pipe.

In the days of old, the Lord spoke by the mouths of his servants, the prophets; now he speaks to us by the spirit of his Son.

I had not only the feeling part of religion, but I could hear the small, still voice within speaking to me.

When I took the pipe to smoke, it would be applied within, ‘It is an idol, a lust; worship the Lord with clean lips.

’ So, I felt it was not right to smoke.

The Lord also sent a woman to convince me.

I was one day in a house, and I took out my pipe to light it at the fire, and Mary Hawke—for that was the woman’s name—said, ‘Do you not feel it is wrong to smoke?

’ I said that I felt something inside telling me that it was an idol, a lust, and she said that was the Lord.

Then I said, ‘Now, I must give it up, for the Lord is telling me of it inside, and the woman outside, so the tobacco must go, love it as I may.

’ There and then I took the tobacco out of my pocket, and threw it into the fire, and put the pipe under my foot, ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

’ And I have not smoked since.

I found it hard to break off old habits, but I cried to the Lord for help, and he gave me strength, for he has said, ‘Call upon me in the day of trouble, and I will deliver thee.

’ The day after I gave up smoking I had the toothache so bad that I did not know what to do.

I

thought this was owing to giving up the pipe, but I said I would never smoke again, if I lost every tooth in my head.

I said, ‘Lord, thou hast told us My yoke is easy and my burden is light,’ and when I said that, all the pain left me.

Sometimes the thought of the pipe would come back to me very strong; but the Lord strengthened me against the habit, and, bless his name, I have not smoked since.

” Bray’s biographer writes that after he had given up smoking, he thought that he would chew a little, but he conquered this dirty habit, too.

“On one occasion,” Bray said, “when at a prayer‐ meeting at Hicks Mill, I heard the Lord say to me, ‘Worship me with clean lips.

’ So, when we got up from our knees, I took the quid out of my mouth and ‘whipped ’en’ [threw it] under the form.

But, when we got on our knees again, I put another quid into my mouth.

Then the Lord said to me again, ‘Worship me with clean lips.

’ So I took the quid out of my mouth, and whipped ’en under the form again, and said, ‘Yes, Lord, I will.

’ From that time I gave up chewing as well as smoking, and have been a free man.

” The ascetic forms which the impulse for veracity and purity of life may take are often pathetic enough.

The early Quakers, for example, had hard battles to wage against the worldliness and insincerity of the ecclesiastical Christianity of their time.

Yet the battle that cost them most wounds was probably that which they fought in defense of their own right to social veracity and sincerity in their thee‐ing and thou‐ing, in not doffing the hat or giving titles of respect.

It was laid on George Fox that these conventional customs were a lie and a sham, and the whole body of his followers thereupon renounced them, as a sacrifice to truth, and so that their acts and the spirit they professed might be more in accord.

“When the Lord sent me into the world,” says Fox in his Journal, “he forbade me to put off my hat to any, high or low: and I was required to ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ all men and women, without any respect to rich or poor, great or small.

And as I traveled up and down, I was not to bid people Good‐morning, or Good‐evening, neither might I bow or scrape with my leg to any one.

This made the sects and professions rage.

Oh!

the rage that was in the priests, magistrates, professors, and people of all sorts: and especially in priests and professors: for though ‘thou’ to a single person was according to their accidence and grammar rules, and according to the Bible, yet they could not bear to hear it: and because I could not put off my hat to them, it set them all into a rage....

Oh!

the scorn, heat, and fury that arose!

Oh!

the blows, punchings, beatings, and imprisonments that we underwent for not putting off our hats to men!

Some had their hats violently plucked off and thrown away, so that they quite lost them.

The bad language and evil usage we received on this account is hard to be expressed, besides the danger we were sometimes in of losing our lives for this matter, and that by the great professors of Christianity, who thereby discovered they were not true believers.

And though it was but a small thing in the eye of man, yet a wonderful confusion it brought among all professors and priests: but, blessed be the Lord, many came to see the vanity of that custom of putting off hats to men, and felt the weight of Truth’s testimony against it.

” In the autobiography of Thomas Elwood, an early Quaker, who at one time was secretary to John Milton, we find an exquisitely quaint and candid account of the trials he underwent both at home and abroad, in following Fox’s canons of sincerity.

The anecdotes are too lengthy for citation; but Elwood sets down his manner of feeling about these things in a shorter passage, which I will quote as a characteristic utterance of spiritual sensibility:— “By this divine light, then,” says Elwood, “I saw that though I had not the evil of the common uncleanliness, debauchery, profaneness, and pollutions of the world to put away, because I had, through the great goodness of God and a civil education, been preserved out of those grosser evils, yet I had many other evils to put away and to cease from; some of which were not by the world, which lies in wickedness (1 John v. 19), accounted evils, but by the light of Christ were made manifest to me to be evils, and as such condemned in me.

“As particularly those fruits and effects of pride that discover themselves in the vanity and superfluity of apparel; which I took too much delight in.

This evil of my doings I was required to put away and cease from; and judgment lay upon me till I did so.

“I took off from my apparel those unnecessary trimmings of lace, ribbons, and useless buttons, which had no real service, but were set on only for that which was by mistake called ornament; and I ceased to wear rings.

“Again, the giving of flattering titles to men between whom and me there was not any relation to which such titles could be pretended to belong.

This was an evil I had been much addicted to, and was accounted a ready artist in; therefore this evil also was I required to put away and cease from.

So that thenceforward I durst not say, Sir, Master, My Lord, Madam (or My Dame); or say Your Servant to any one to whom I did not stand in the real relation of a servant, which I had never done to any.

“Again, respect of persons, in uncovering the head and bowing the knee or body in salutation, was a practice I had been much in the use of; and this, being one of the vain customs of the world, introduced by the spirit of the world, instead of the true honor which this is a false representation of, and used in deceit as a token of respect by persons one to another, who bear no real respect one to another; and besides this, being a type and a proper emblem of that divine honor which all ought to pay to Almighty God, and which all of all sorts, who take upon them the Christian name, appear in when they offer their prayers to him, and therefore should not be given to men;—I found this to be one of those evils which I had been too long doing; therefore I was now required to put it away and cease from it.

“Again, the corrupt and unsound form of speaking in the plural number to a single person, _you_ to one, instead of _thou_, contrary to the pure, plain, and single language of truth, _thou_ to one, and _you_ to more than one, which had always been used by God to men, and men to God, as well as one to another, from the oldest record of time till corrupt men, for corrupt ends, in later and corrupt times, to flatter, fawn, and work upon the corrupt nature in men, brought in that false and senseless way of speaking _you_ to one, which has since corrupted the modern languages, and hath greatly debased the spirits and depraved the manners of men;—this evil custom I had been as forward in as others, and this I was now called out of and required to cease from.

“These and many more evil customs which had sprung up in the night of darkness and general apostasy from the truth and true religion were now, by the inshining of this pure ray of divine light in my conscience, gradually discovered to me to be what I ought to cease from, shun, and stand a witness against.

”(175) These early Quakers were Puritans indeed.

The slightest inconsistency between profession and deed jarred some of them to active protest.

John Woolman writes in his diary:— “In these journeys I have been where much cloth hath been dyed;

and have at sundry times walked over ground where much of their dyestuffs has drained away.

This hath produced a longing in my mind that people might come into cleanness of spirit, cleanness of person, and cleanness about their houses and garments.

Dyes being invented partly to please the eye, and partly to hide dirt, I have felt in this weak state, when traveling in dirtiness, and affected with unwholesome scents, a strong desire that the nature of dyeing cloth to hide dirt may be more fully considered.

“Washing our garments to keep them sweet is cleanly, but it is the opposite to real cleanliness to hide dirt in them.

Through giving way to hiding dirt in our garments a spirit which would conceal that which is disagreeable is strengthened.

Real cleanliness becometh a holy people; but hiding that which is not clean by coloring our garments seems contrary to the sweetness of sincerity.

Through some sorts of dyes cloth is rendered less useful.

And if the value of dyestuffs, and expense of dyeing, and the damage done to cloth, were all added together, and that cost applied to keeping all sweet and clean, how much more would real cleanliness prevail.

“Thinking often on these things, the use of hats and garments dyed with a dye hurtful to them, and wearing more clothes in summer than are useful, grew more uneasy to me; believing them to be customs which have not their foundation in pure wisdom.

The apprehension of being singular from my beloved friends was a strait upon me; and thus I continued in the use of some things, contrary to my judgment, about nine months.

Then I thought of getting a hat the natural color of the fur, but the apprehension of being looked upon as one affecting singularity felt uneasy to me.

On this account I was under close exercise of mind in the time of our general spring meeting in 1762, greatly desiring to be rightly directed; when, being deeply bowed in spirit before the Lord, I was made willing to submit to what I apprehended was required of me; and when I returned home, got a hat of the natural color of the fur.

“In attending meetings, this singularity was a trial to me, and more especially at this time, as white hats were used by some who were fond of following the changeable modes of dress, and as some friends, who knew not from what motives I wore it, grew shy of me, I felt my way for a time shut up in the exercise of the ministry.

Some friends were apprehensive that my wearing such a hat savored of an affected singularity: those who spoke with me in a friendly way, I generally informed in a few words, that I believed my wearing it was not in my own will.

” When the craving for moral consistency and purity is developed to this degree, the subject may well find the outer world too full of shocks to dwell in, and can unify his life and keep his soul unspotted only by withdrawing from it.

That law which impels the artist to achieve harmony in his composition by simply dropping out whatever jars, or suggests a discord, rules also in the spiritual life.

To omit, says Stevenson, is the one art in literature: “If I knew how to omit, I should ask no other knowledge.

” And life, when full of disorder and slackness and vague superfluity, can no more have what we call character than literature can have it under similar conditions.

So monasteries and communities of sympathetic devotees open their doors, and in their changeless order, characterized by omissions quite as much as constituted of actions, the holy‐minded person finds that inner smoothness and cleanness which it is torture to him to feel violated at every turn by the discordancy and brutality of secular existence.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ That the scrupulosity of purity may be carried to a fantastic extreme must be admitted.

In this it resembles Asceticism, to which further symptom of saintliness we had better turn next.

The adjective “ascetic” is applied to conduct originating on diverse psychological levels, which I might as well begin by distinguishing from one another.

1. Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.

2. Temperance in meat and drink, simplicity of apparel, chastity, and non‐pampering of the body generally, may be fruits of the love of purity, shocked by whatever savors of the sensual.

3. They may also be fruits of love, that is, they may appeal to the subject in the light of sacrifices which he is happy in making to the Deity whom he acknowledges.

4. Again, ascetic mortifications and torments may be due to pessimistic feelings about the self, combined with theological beliefs concerning expiation.

The devotee may feel that he is buying himself free, or escaping worse sufferings hereafter, by doing penance now.

5. In psychopathic persons, mortifications may be entered on irrationally, by a sort of obsession or fixed idea which comes as a challenge and must be worked off, because only thus does the subject get his interior consciousness feeling right again.

6. Finally, ascetic exercises may in rarer instances be prompted by genuine perversions of the bodily sensibility, in consequence of which normally pain‐giving stimuli are actually felt as pleasures.

I will try to give an instance under each of these heads in turn; but it is not easy to get them pure, for in cases pronounced enough to be immediately classed as ascetic, several of the assigned motives usually work together.

Moreover, before citing any examples at all, I must invite you to some general psychological considerations which apply to all of them alike.

A strange moral transformation has within the past century swept over our Western world.

We no longer think that we are called on to face physical pain with equanimity.

It is not expected of a man that he should either endure it or inflict much of it, and to listen to the recital of cases of it makes our flesh creep morally as well as physically.

The way in which our ancestors looked upon pain as an eternal ingredient of the world’s order, and both caused and suffered it as a matter‐of‐course portion of their day’s work, fills us with amazement.

We wonder that any human beings could have been so callous.

The result of this historic alteration is that even in the Mother Church herself, where ascetic discipline has such a fixed traditional prestige as a factor of merit, it has largely come into desuetude, if not discredit.

A believer who flagellates or “macerates” himself to‐day arouses more wonder and fear than emulation.

Many Catholic writers who admit that the times have changed in this respect do so resignedly; and even add that perhaps it is as well not to waste feelings in regretting the matter, for to return to the heroic corporeal discipline of ancient days might be an extravagance.

Where to seek the easy and the pleasant seems instinctive—and instinctive it appears to be in man; any deliberate tendency to pursue the hard and painful as such and for their own sakes might well strike one as purely abnormal.

Nevertheless, in moderate degrees it is natural and even usual to human nature to court the arduous.

It is only the extreme manifestations of the tendency that can be regarded as a paradox.

The psychological reasons for this lie near the surface.

When we drop abstractions and take what we call our will in the act, we see that it is a very complex function.

It involves both stimulations and inhibitions; it follows generalized habits; it is escorted by reflective criticisms; and it leaves a good or a bad taste of itself behind, according to the manner of the performance.

The result is that, quite apart from the immediate pleasure which any sensible experience may give us, our own general moral attitude in procuring or undergoing the experience brings with it a secondary satisfaction or distaste.

Some men and women, indeed, there are who can live on smiles and the word “yes” forever.

But for others (indeed for most), this is too tepid and relaxed a moral climate.

Passive happiness is slack and insipid, and soon grows mawkish and intolerable.

Some austerity and wintry negativity, some roughness, danger, stringency, and effort, some “no!

no!

” must be mixed in, to produce the sense of an existence with character and texture and power.

The range of individual differences in this respect is enormous; but whatever the mixture of yeses and noes may be, the person is infallibly aware when he has struck it in the right proportion _for him_.

This, he feels, is my proper vocation, this is the _optimum_, the law, the life for me to live.

Here I find the degree of equilibrium, safety, calm, and leisure which I need, or here I find the challenge, passion, fight, and hardship without which my soul’s energy expires.

Every individual soul, in short, like every individual machine or organism, has its own best conditions of efficiency.

A given machine will run best under a certain steam‐pressure, a certain amperage; an organism under a certain diet, weight, or exercise.

You seem to do best, I heard a doctor say to a patient, at about 140 millimeters of arterial tension.

And it is just so with our sundry souls: some are happiest in calm weather;

some need the sense of tension, of strong volition, to make them feel alive and well.

For these latter souls, whatever is gained from day to day must be paid for by sacrifice and inhibition, or else it comes too cheap and has no zest.

Now when characters of this latter sort become religious, they are apt to turn the edge of their need of effort and negativity against their natural self; and the ascetic life gets evolved as a consequence.

When Professor Tyndall in one of his lectures tells us that Thomas Carlyle put him into his bath‐tub every morning of a freezing Berlin winter, he proclaimed one of the lowest grades of asceticism.

Even without Carlyle, most of us find it necessary to our soul’s health to start the day with a rather cool immersion.

A little farther along the scale we get such statements as this, from one of my correspondents, an agnostic:— “Often at night in my warm bed I would feel ashamed to depend so on the warmth, and whenever the thought would come over me I would have to get up, no matter what time of night it was, and stand for a minute in the cold, just so as to prove my manhood.

” Such cases as these belong simply to our head 1. In the next case we probably have a mixture of heads 2 and 3—the asceticism becomes far more systematic and pronounced.

The writer is a Protestant, whose sense of moral energy could doubtless be gratified on no lower terms, and I take his case from Starbuck’s manuscript collection.

“I practiced fasting and mortification of the flesh.

I secretly made burlap shirts, and put the burrs next the skin, and wore pebbles in my shoes.

I would spend nights flat on my back on the floor without any covering.

” The Roman Church has organized and codified all this sort of thing, and given it a market‐value in the shape of “merit.

” But we see the cultivation of hardship cropping out under every sky and in every faith, as a spontaneous need of character.

Thus we read of Channing, when first settled as a Unitarian minister, that— “He was now more simple than ever, and seemed to have become incapable of any form of self‐indulgence.

He took the smallest room in the house for his study, though he might easily have commanded one more light, airy, and in every way more suitable;

and chose for his sleeping chamber an attic which he shared with a younger brother.

The furniture of the latter might have answered for the cell of an anchorite, and consisted of a hard mattress on a cot‐bedstead, plain wooden chairs and table, with matting on the floor.

It was without fire, and to cold he was throughout life extremely sensitive; but he never complained or appeared in any way to be conscious of inconvenience.

‘I recollect,’ says his brother, ‘after one most severe night, that in the morning he sportively thus alluded to his suffering: “If my bed were my country, I should be somewhat like Bonaparte: I have no control except over the part which I occupy; the instant I move, frost takes possession.

” ’ In sickness only would he change for the time his apartment and accept a few comforts.

The dress too that he habitually adopted was of most inferior quality; and garments were constantly worn which the world would call mean, though an almost feminine neatness preserved him from the least appearance of neglect.

”(176) Channing’s asceticism, such as it was, was evidently a compound of hardihood and love of purity.

The democracy which is an offshoot of the enthusiasm of humanity, and of which I will speak later under the head of the cult of poverty, doubtless bore also a share.

Certainly there was no pessimistic element in his case.

In the next case we have a strongly pessimistic element, so that it belongs under head 4. John Cennick was Methodism’s first lay preacher.

In 1735 he was convicted of sin, while walking in Cheapside,— “And at once left off song‐singing, card‐playing, and attending theatres.

Sometimes he wished to go to a popish monastery, to spend his life in devout retirement.

At other times he longed to live in a cave, sleeping on fallen leaves, and feeding on forest fruits.

He fasted long and often, and prayed nine times a day....

Fancying dry bread too great an indulgence for so great a sinner as himself, he began to feed on potatoes, acorns, crabs, and grass; and often wished that he could live on roots and herbs.

At length, in 1737, he found peace with God, and went on his way rejoicing.

”(177) In this poor man we have morbid melancholy and fear, and the sacrifices made are to purge out sin, and to buy safety.

The hopelessness of Christian theology in respect of the flesh and the natural man generally has, in systematizing fear, made of it one tremendous incentive to self‐ mortification.

It would be quite unfair, however, in spite of the fact that this incentive has often been worked in a mercenary way for hortatory purposes, to call it a mercenary incentive.

The impulse to expiate and do penance is, in its first intention, far too immediate and spontaneous an expression of self‐despair and anxiety to be obnoxious to any such reproach.

In the form of loving sacrifice, of spending all we have to show our devotion, ascetic discipline of the severest sort may be the fruit of highly optimistic religious feeling.

M.

Vianney, the curé of Ars, was a French country priest, whose holiness was exemplary.

We read in his life the following account of his inner need of sacrifice:— “ ‘On this path,’ M. Vianney said, ‘it is only the first step that costs.

There is in mortification a balm and a savor without which one cannot live when once one has made their acquaintance.

There is but one way in which to give one’s self to God,—that is, to give one’s self entirely, and to keep nothing for one’s self.

The little that one keeps is only good to double one and make one suffer.

’ Accordingly he imposed it on himself that he should never smell a flower, never drink when parched with thirst, never drive away a fly, never show disgust before a repugnant object, never complain of anything that had to do with his personal comfort, never sit down, never lean upon his elbows when he was kneeling.

The Curé of Ars was very sensitive to cold, but he would never take means to protect himself against it.

During a very severe winter, one of his missionaries contrived a false floor to his confessional and placed a metal case of hot water beneath.

The trick succeeded, and the Saint was deceived: ‘God is very good,’ he said with emotion.

‘This year, through all the cold, my feet have always been warm.

’ ”(178) In this case the spontaneous impulse to make sacrifices for the pure love of God was probably the uppermost conscious motive.

We may class it, then, under our head 3. Some authors think that the impulse to sacrifice is the main religious phenomenon.

It is a prominent, a universal phenomenon certainly, and lies deeper than any special creed.

Here, for instance, is what seems to be a spontaneous example of it, simply expressing what seemed right at the time between the individual and his Maker.

Cotton Mather, the New England Puritan divine, is generally reputed a rather grotesque pedant; yet what is more touchingly simple than his relation of what happened when his wife came to die?

“When I saw to what a point of resignation I was now called of the Lord,” he says, “I resolved, with his help, therein to glorify him.

So, two hours before my lovely consort expired, I kneeled by her bedside, and I took into my two hands a dear hand, the dearest in the world.

With her thus in my hands, I solemnly and sincerely gave her up unto the Lord: and in token of my real _Resignation_, I gently put her out of my hands, and laid away a most lovely hand, resolving that I would never touch it more.

This was the hardest, and perhaps the bravest action that ever I did.

She ...

told me that she signed and sealed my act of resignation.

And though before that she called for me continually, she after this never asked for me any more.

”(179) Father Vianney’s asceticism taken in its totality was simply the result of a permanent flood of high spiritual enthusiasm, longing to make proof of itself.

The Roman Church has, in its incomparable fashion, collected all the motives towards asceticism together, and so codified them that any one wishing to pursue Christian perfection may find a practical system mapped out for him in any one of a number of ready‐made manuals.

(180) The dominant Church notion of perfection is of course the negative one of avoidance of sin.

Sin proceeds from concupiscence, and concupiscence from our carnal passions and temptations, chief of which are pride, sensuality in all its forms, and the loves of worldly excitement and possession.

All these sources of sin must be resisted; and discipline and austerities are a most efficacious mode of meeting them.

Hence there are always in these books chapters on self‐mortification.

But whenever a procedure is codified, the more delicate spirit of it evaporates, and if we wish the undiluted ascetic spirit,—the passion of self‐contempt wreaking itself on the poor flesh, the divine irrationality of devotion making a sacrificial gift of all it has (its sensibilities, namely) to the object of its adoration,—we must go to autobiographies, or other individual documents.

Saint John of the Cross, a Spanish mystic who flourished—or rather who existed, for there was little that suggested flourishing about him—in the sixteenth century, will supply a passage suitable for our purpose.

“First of all, carefully excite in yourself an habitual affectionate will in all things to imitate Jesus Christ.

If anything agreeable offers itself to your senses, yet does not at the same time tend purely to the honor and glory of God, renounce it and separate yourself from it for the love of Christ, who all his life long had no other taste or wish than to do the will of his Father whom he called his meat and nourishment.

For example, you take satisfaction in _hearing_ of things in which the glory of God bears no part.

Deny yourself this satisfaction, mortify your wish to listen.

You take pleasure in _seeing_ objects which do not raise your mind to God: refuse yourself this pleasure, and turn away your eyes.

The same with conversations and all other things.

Act similarly, so far as you are able, with all the operations of the senses, striving to make yourself free from their yokes.

“The radical remedy lies in the mortification of the four great natural passions, joy, hope, fear, and grief.

You must seek to deprive these of every satisfaction and leave them as it were in darkness and the void.

Let your soul therefore turn always: “Not to what is most easy, but to what is hardest;

“Not to what tastes best, but to what is most distasteful;

“Not to what most pleases, but to what disgusts;

“Not to matter of consolation, but to matter for desolation rather;

“Not to rest, but to labor;

“Not to desire the more, but the less;

“Not to aspire to what is highest and most precious, but to what is lowest and most contemptible;

“Not to will anything, but to will nothing;

“Not to seek the best in everything, but to seek the worst, so that you may enter for the love of Christ into a complete destitution, a perfect poverty of spirit, and an absolute renunciation of everything in this world.

“Embrace these practices with all the energy of your soul and you will find in a short time great delights and unspeakable consolations.

“Despise yourself, and wish that others should despise you.

“Speak to your own disadvantage, and desire others to do the same;

“Conceive a low opinion of yourself, and find it good when others hold the same;

“To enjoy the taste of all things, have no taste for anything.

“To know all things, learn to know nothing.

“To possess all things, resolve to possess nothing.

“To be all things, be willing to be nothing.

“To get to where you have no taste for anything, go through whatever experiences you have no taste for.

“To learn to know nothing, go whither you are ignorant.

“To reach what you possess not, go whithersoever you own nothing.

“To be what you are not, experience what you are not.

” These later verses play with that vertigo of self‐contradiction which is so dear to mysticism.