The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
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p. 367in men come to life again in war, and for war's uses they are incommensurably good." ^ These words are of course literally true. The immediate aim of the soldier's life is, as Moltke said, destruc- ^- tion, and nothing but destruction ; and whatever constructions wars result in are remote and non-military.
Consequently the soldier cannot train himself to be too feelingless to all those usual sympathies and respects, whether for persons or for things, that make for conservation. Yet the fact remains that war is a school of strenuous life and heroism ; and, being in the line of aboriginal instinct, is the only school that as yet is universally available.
But when we gravely ask oui-selves whether this wholesale organization of irrationality and crime be our only bulwark against effeminacy, we stand aghast at the thought, and think more kindly of ascetic religion.
One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat, g A ^A^* What we now need to discover in the social realm is the j / ^©. moral equivalent of war : something heroic that will ^"*y ^'^^ speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be /*>« as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible.
I have often thought that in the old monkish poverty- worship, in spite of the pedan- '-^irdi^ try which infested it, there might be something lilie that moral equivalent of war which we are seeking.
May not voluntarily accepted poverty be ' the strenuous life/ without the need of crushing weaker peoples ? ^ Poverty indeed is the strenuous life, — without brass bands or uniforms or hysteric popular applause or lies or circumlocutions ; and when one sees the way in which wealth-getting enters as an ideal into the very bone and marrow of our generation, one wonders whether a revival ^ C. V. B. K. : Friedens- und Kriegs-moral der Heere. Quoted by Hamon : Psychologie du Militaire professional, 1895, p. xli.
p. 368of the belief that poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be * the transformation of miUtary courage,' and the spiritual reform which our time stands most in need of. Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor.
We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition.
We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant : the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly, — the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape.
When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship ; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.
It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption.
There are thousands of conjunctures in which a wealthbound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman. Think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would p. 369give us if we were devoted to unpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tongues or fear to vote the revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes of promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our faces ; yet, while we hved, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit, and our example would help to set free our generation.
The cause would need its funds, but we its servants would be potent in proportion as we personally were contented with our poverty. I recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from ^ which our civilization suffers.
I have now said all that I can usefully say about the several fruits of religion as they are manifested in saintly lives, so I will make a brief review and pass to my more general conclusions. Our question, you will remember, is asjto whether religion stands approved by its fruits, as these are exhibited in the saintly type of character.
Single attributes of saintliness may, it is true, be temperamental endowments, found in non-rehgious individuals. But the whole group of them forms a combination which, as such, is religious, for it seems to flow from the sense of the divine as from its psychological centre.
Whoever possesses strongly this sense comes naturally to think that the smallest details of this world derive infinite significance from their relation to an unseen divine order. The thought of this order yields him a superior denomination of happiness, and a steadfastness of soul with which no other can compare. In social relations his serviceability is exemplary ; he abounds in impulses to help. His help is in-
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