The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 346we realize the gap between tlie thirteenth and the twentieth century, and we feel that saintliness of character may yield almost absolutely worthless fruits if it be associated with such inferior intellectual sympathies.

What with science, idealism, and democracy, our own imagination has grown to need a God of an entirely different temperament from that Being interested exclusively in dealing out personal favors, with whom our ancestors were so contented.

Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness ; and even the best professional sainthood of former centuries, pent in as it is to such a conception, seems to us curiously shallow and unedifying.

Take Saint Teresa, for example, one of the ablest women, in many respects, of whose life we have the record. She had a powerful intellect of the practical order. She wrote admirable descriptive psychology, possessed a will equal to any emergency, great talent for politics and business, a buoyant disposition, and a firstrate literary style. She was tenaciously aspiring, and / put her whole life at the service of her religious ideals.

Yet so paltry were these, according to our present way of thinking, that (although I know that others have been moved differently) I confess that my only feeling in ing Sunday, while she was thanking God for this favor, behold the Son of God, more beauteous than thousands of angels, takes her in His arms as if He were proud of her, and presents her to God the Father, in that perfection of sanctity with which He had dowered her.

And the Father took such delight in this soul thus presented by His only Son, that, as if unable longer to restrain Himself, He gave her, and the Holy Ghost gave her also, the Sanctity attributed to each by His own Sanctus — and thus she remained endowed with the plenary fullness of the blessing of Sanctity, bestowed on her by Omnipotence, by Wisdom, and by Love. Revelations de Sainte Gertrude, Paris, 1898, i. 44, 186.

p. 347reading her has been pity that so much vitaHty of soul / should have found such poor employment. In spite of the sufferings which she endured, there is a curious flavor of superficiality about her genius.

A Birmingham anthropologist, Dr. Jordan, has divided the human race into two types, whom he calls ' shrews ' and 'non-shrews' respectivejiy.^ The shrew-type is defined as possessing an * active unimpassioned temperament. In other words, shrews are the ' motors,' rather than the * sensories,' ^ and their expressions are as a rule more energetic than the feelings which appear to prompt them.

Saint Teresa, paradoxical as such a judgment may sound, was a typical shrew, in this sense of the term. The bustle of her style, as well as of her hfe, proves it. Not only must she receive unheard-of personal favors and spiritual graces from her Saviour, but she must immediately write about them and exploiter them professionally, and use her expertness to give instruction to those less privileged.

Her voluble egotism ; her sense, not of radical bad beings as the really contrite have it, but of her ' faults ' and ^ imperfections ' in the plural ; her stereotyped humility and return upon herself, as covered with ^ confusion ' at each new manifestation of God's singular partiality for a person so unworthy, are typical of shrewdom : a paramountly feeling nature would be objectively lost in gratitude, and silent.

She had some public instincts, it is true ; she hated the Lutherans, and longed for the church's triumph over them ; but in the main her idea of religion seems to have been that of an endless amatory flirtation — if one may say so without irrever- 1 William Fueneaux Jordan : Character in Birth and Parentage, first edition. Later editions change the nomenclature. 2 As to this distinction, see the admirably practical account in J. M. Baldwin's little book, The Story of the Mind, 1898.

p. 348ence — between the devotee and the deity ; and apart from helping younger nuns to go in this direction by the inspiration of her example and instruction, there is absolutely no human use in her, or sign of any general human interest. Yet the spirit of her age, far from rebuking her, exalted her as superhuman. We have to pass a similar judgment on the whole notion of saintship based on merits.

Any God who, on the bne hand, can care to keep a pedantically minute account of individual shortcomings, and on the other can feel such partialities, and load particular creatures with such insipid marks of favor, is too small-minded a God for our credence.

When Luther, in his immense manly way, swept off by a stroke of his hand the very notion of \ a debit and credit account kept with individuals by the j Almighty, he stretched the soul's imagination and savecy theology from puerility. So much for mere devotion, divorced from the intellectual conceptions which might guide it towards bearing useful human fruit. The next saintly virtue in which we find excess is Purity.

In theopathic characters, like those whom we have just considered, the love of God must not be mixed with any other love. Father and mother, sisters, brothers, and friends are felt as interfering distractions ; for sensitiveness and narrowness, when they occur together, as they often do, require above all things a simplified world to dwell in. Variety and confusion are too much for their powers of comfortable adaptation.

But whereas your aggressive pietist reaches his unity objectively, by forcibly stamping disorder and divergence out, your retiring pietist reaches his subjectively, leaving disorder in the world at large, but making a smaller world in which he dwells