The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 475sion of it, I will quote a page from one of Martineau's sermons : — " The universe, open to the eye to-day, looks as it did a thousand years ago : and the morning hymn of Milton does but tell the beauty with which our own familiar sun dressed the earliest fields and gai'dens of the world. We see what all our fathers saw.

And if we cannot find God in your house or in mine, upon the roadside or the margin of the sea ; in the bursting seed or opening flower; in the day duty or the night musing; in the general laugh and the secret grief ; in the procession of life, ever entering afresh, and solemnly passing by and dropping off ; I do not think we should discern him any more on the grass of Eden, or beneath the moonlight of Gethsemane.

Depend upon it, it is not the want of greater miracles, but of the soul to perceive such as are allowed us still, that makes us push all the sanctities into the far spaces we cannot reach. The * devout feel that wherever God's hand is, there is miracle : and it is simply an indevoutness which imagines that only where miracle is, can there be the real hand of God.

The customs of Heaven ought surely to be more sacred in our eyes than its anomalies ; the dear old ways, of which the Most High is never tired, than the strange things which he does not love well enough ever to repeat. And he who will but discern beneath the sun, as he rises any morning, the supporting finger of the Almighty, may recover the sweet and reverent surprise with which Adam gazed on the first dawn in Paradise.

It is no outward change, no shifting in time or place ; but only the loving meditation of the pure in heart, that can reawaken the Eternal from the sleep within our souls : that can render him a reality again, and reassert for him once more his ancient name of ' the Living God.

" i When we see all things in God, and refer all things to him, we read in common matters superior expressions of ^ James Martineau : end of the sermon • Help Thou Mine Unbelief,' in Endeavours after a Christian Life, 2d series. Compare with this page the extract from Voysey on p. 275, above, and those from Pascal and Madame Guyon on p. 286.

p. 476meaninsf. The deadness with which custom invests the o famihar vanishes, and existence as a whole appears transfigured.

The state of a mind thus awakened from torpor is well expressed in these words, which I take from a friend's letter : — " If we occupy ourselves in summing up all the mercies and^ bounties we are privileged to have, we are overwhelmed by \ their number (so great that we can imagine ourselves unable to ' give ourselves time even to begin to review the things we may t>- imagine we have not).

We sum them and realize that we are ^ actually killed with God's kindness ; that we are surrounded \ by bounties upon bounties, without which all would fall. Should we not love it ; should we not feel buoyed up by the Eternal Arms? Sometimes this realization that facts are of divine sending, instead of being habitual, is casual, Hke a mystical experience.

Father Gratry gives this instance from his youthful melancholy period : — " One day I had a moment of consolation, because I met with something which seemed to me ideally perfect. It was a poor drummer beating the tattoo in the streets of Paris. I walked behind him in returning to the school on the evening of a holiday.

His drum gave out the tattoo in such a way that, at that moment at least, however peevish I were, I could find no pretext for fault-finding. It was impossible to conceive more nerve or spirit, better time or measure, more clearness or richness, than were in this drumming. Ideal desire could go no farther in that direction. I was enchanted and consoled ; the perfection of this wretched act did me good.

Good is at least possible, I said, since the ideal can thus sometimes get embodied."! In Senancour's novel of Obermann a similar transient lifting of the veil is recorded. In Paris streets, on a March day, he comes across a flower in bloom, a jonquil : * Sourenirs de ma Jeunesse, 1897, p. 122.

p. 477" It was the strongest expression of desire : it was the first perfume of the year. I felt all the happiness destined for man. This unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal world, arose in me complete. I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous. I know not what shape, what analogy, what secret of relation it was that made me see in this flower a limitless beauty. ...

I shall never inclose in a conception this power, this immensity that nothing will express ; this form that nothing will contain ; this ideal of a better world which one feels, but which, it seems, nature has not made actual." ^ We heard in previous lectures of the vivified face of the world as it may appear to converts after their awakening.^ As a rule, religious persons generally assume that whatever natural facts connect themselves in any way with their destiny are significant of the divine purposes with them.

Through prayer the purpose, often far from obvious, comes home to them, and if it be ' trial,' strength to endure the trial is given. Thus at all stages ■ of the prayerful life we find the persuasion that in the process of communion energy from on high flows in to meet demand, and becomes operative within the phenomenal world.

So long as this operativeness is admitted to be real, it makes no essential difference whether its immediate effects be subjective or objective. The fundamental rehgious point is that in prayer, spiritual energy, which otherwise "woiild slumber, does becomB active, and spiritual work of some kind is effected really. So much for Prayer, taken in the wide sense of any kind of communion.

As the core of rehgion, we must return to it in the next lecture. The last aspect of the religious life which remains for 1 Op. cit., Letter XXX. ^ Above, p. 248 ff. Compare the withdrawal of expression from the world, in Melancholiacs, p. 151.