The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
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p. 289cries. And how should I have cried, since I was swooning with happiness within ?
" ^ 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.^ 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 hy 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 accompHshed, 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." ^ ^ Claparede et Goty : Deux Heroines de la Foi, Paris, 1880, p. 112.
2 Compare these three different statements of it : A. P. Call : As a Matter of Course, Boston, 1894 ; H. W. Dresser : Living by the Spirit, New York and London, 1900 ; H. W. Smith : The Christian's Secret of a Happy- Life, published by the Willard Tract Repository, and now in thousands of hands, 2 T. C. Upham: Life of Madame Catharine Adorna, 3d ed., New York, 1864, pp. 158, 172-174.
p. 290Hinduism, mind-ciire, 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 fj 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 sj)iritual 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, p. 291so 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 sincer- / ity in their thee-ing and thou-ing, in not dofâng the hat or giving titles of respect. It was laid on George Fox
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