The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
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p. 355Proceedinof onwards in our search of relisfious extra vagance, we next come upon excesses of Tenderness and Charity. Here saintliness has to face the charge of preserving the unfit, and breeding parasites and beggars. ' Resist not evil/ * Love your enemies/ these are saintly maxims of which men of this world find it hard to speak without impatience.
Are the men of this world right, or are the saints in possession of the deeper range of truth? No simple answer is possible. Here, if anywhere, one feels the complexity of the moral life, and the mysteriousness of the way in which facts and ideals are interwoven. Perfect conduct is a- relation between three terms : the actor, the objects for which he acts, and the recipients of the action.
In order that conduct should be abstractly perfect, all three terms, intention, execution, and reception, should be suited to one another. The best intention will fail if it either work by false means or address itself to the wrong recipient. Thus no critic or estimator of the value of conduct can confine himself to the actor's animus alone, apart from the other elements of the performance.
As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors. The saint may simply give the universe into the hands of the enemy by his trustfulness. He may by non-resistance cut off his own survival.
Herbert Spencer tells us that the perfect man's conduct will appear perfect only when the environment is perfect : to no inferior environment is it suitably adapted. We may paraphrase this by cordially admitting that p. 356saintly conduct would be the most perfect conduct conceivable in an environment where all were saints already ; but by adding that in an environment where few are saints, and many the exact reverse of saints, it must be ill adapted.
We must frankly confess, then, using our empirical common sense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in the world that actually is, the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be, and often have been," manifested in excess. The powers of darkness have systematically taken advantage of them. The whole modern scientific organization of charity is a consequence of the failure of simply giving alms.
The whole history of constitutional government is a commentary on the excellence of resisting evil, and when one cheek is smitten, . of smiting back and not turning the other cheek also. You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, you believe in fighting fire with fire, in shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and swindlers.
And yet you are sure, as I am sure, that were the world confined to these hard-headed, hard-hearted, and hard-fisted methods exclusively, were there no one prompt to help a brother first, and find out afterwards whether he were worthy ; no one willing to drown his private wrongs in pity for the wronger' s person ; no one ready to be duped many a time rather than live always on suspicion ; no one glad to treat individuals passionately and impulsively rather than by general rules of prudence ; the world would be an infinitely worse place than it is now to live in.
The tender grace, not of a day that is dead, but of a day yet to be born somehow, with the golden rule | grown natural, would be cut out from the perspective of our imaginations.
THE VALUE OF SAINTLINESS 3S7 The saints, existing in this way, may, with their extravagances of human tenderness, be prophetic. Nay, innumerable times they have proved themselves prophetic. Treating those whom they met, in spite of the past, in spite of all appearances, as worthy, they have stimulated them to be worthy, miraculously transformed them by their radiant example and by the challenge of their expectation.
From this point of view we may admit the human charity which we find in all saints, and the great excess of it which we find in some saints, to be a genuinely creative social force, tending to make real a degree of virtue which it alone is ready to assume as possible. The saints are authors, mcctores, increasers, of goodness. The potentialities of development in human souls are unfathomable.
So many who seemed irretrievably f^ harderieTTiaveTn point of fact been softened, converted, \ \^ regenerated, in ways that amazed the subjects even more than they surprised the spectators, that we never can be sure in advance of any man that his salvation by the way of love is hopeless. We have no right to speak of human crocodiles and boa-constrictors as of fixedly incurable beings.
We know not the complexities of personality, the smouldering emotional fires, the other facets of the character-polyhedron, the resources of the subliminal region. St. Paul long ago made our ancestors familiar with the idea that every soul is virtually sacred. Since Christ died for us all without exception, St. Paul said, we must despair of no one.
This belief in the essential sacredness of every one expresses itself to-day in all sorts of humane customs and reformatory institutions, and in A growing aversion to the death penalty and to brutality in punishment. The saints, with their extravagance of human tenderness, are the great torch-bearers of this
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