The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 79therefore it is true — such, rightly or wrongly, is one of the ' immediate inferences ' of the religious logic used by ordinary men. " Tlie near presence of God's^pirit," says a German writer,^ " may be experienced in its reality — indeed only experienced.

And the mark by which the spirit's existence and nearness are made irrefutably clear to those who have ever had the experience is the utterly incomparable /ee?W(7 of hajipiness which is connected with the nearness, and which is therefore not only a possible and altogether proper feeling for us to have here below, but is the best and most indispensable proof of God's reality.

No other proof is equally convincing, and therefore happiness is the point from which every efficacious new theology should start. In the hour immediately before us, I shall invite you to consider the simpler kinds of rehgious happiness, leaving the more complex sorts to be treated on a later day. In many persons, happiness is congenital and irreclaimable. ^ Cosmic emotion ' inevitably takes in them the form of enthusiasm and freedom.

I speak not only of those who are animally happy. I mean those who, when unhappiness is offered or proposed to them, positively refuse to feel it, as if it were something mean and wrong. We find such persons in every age, passionately flinging themselves upon their sense of the goodness of life, in spite of the hardships of their own condition, and in spite of the sinister theologies into which they may be born.

From the outset their^ religion is one of union with the divine. The heretics who went before the/ ..^. .,_._ -,»,j.*'' , / reformation are lavishly accused by the church writers of antinomian practices, just as the first Christians were accused of indulgence in orgies by the Romans. It is probable that there never has been a century in which the deliberate refusal to think ill of life has not been ideal- ^ C. HiLTY : Gluck. dritter Theil, 1900, p. 18.

p. 80ized by a sufficient number of persons to form sects, open or secret, who claimed all natural things to be permitted. y Saint Augustine's maxim, Dilige et quod visfac, — i£ you ^ ij but ,love [God], you may do as you incline, — is morally f ««f one of the profoundest of observations, yet it is pregnant, ^ / for such persons, with passports beyond the bounds of 5 ^ conventional morality.

According: to their characters ^f \ they have been refined or gross ; but their belief has ^ been at all times systematic enough to constitute a definite religious attitude. God was for them a giver of freedom, and the sting of evil was overcome. Saint Francis and his immediate disciples were, on the whole, of this company of spirits, of which there are of course infinite varieties.

Rousseau in the earlier years of his writing, Diderot, B. de Saint Pierre, and many of the leaders of the eighteenth century anti-christian movement were of this optimistic type. They owed their influence to a^^^ certain authoritativeness in their feeling that Nature, if you will only trust her sufficiently, is absolutely good.

It is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhaps more often feminine than masculine, and young than old, whose soul is of this sky-blue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all enchanting innocencies, than with dark human passions, who can think no ill of man or God, and in whom religious gladness, being in possession from the outset, needs no deliverance from any antecedent burden.

" God has two families of children on this earth," says Francis W. Newman,^ " the once-born and the twice-horn,''^ and the once-born he describes as follows : " They see God, not as a strict Judge, not as a Glorious Potentate ; but as the animating Spirit of a beautiful harmonious world, Beneficent and Kind, Merciful as well as Pure. The same characters generally have 1 The Soul ; its Sorrows and ita Aspirations, 3d edition, 1852, pp. 89, 91.

p. 81no metaphysical tendencies : they do not look back into themselves. Hence they are not distressed by their own imperfections : yet it would be absurd to call them self-righteous ; for they hardly think of themselves at all.

This childlike quality of their nature makes the opening of religion very happy to them : for they no more shrink from God, than a child from an emperor, before whom the parent trembles : in fact, they have no vivid conception of any of the qualities in which the severer Majesty of God consists.^ He is to them the impersonation of Kindness and Beauty.

They read his character, not in the disordered world of man, but in romantic and harmonious nature. Of human sin they know perhaps little in their own hearts and~liot very much in the world ; and human suffering does but melt them to tenderness. Thus, when they approach God, no inward disturbance ensues ; and without being as yet spiritual, they have a certain complacency and perhaps romantic sense of excitement in their simple worship.

In the Romish Church such characters find a more congenial soil to grow in than in Protestantism, whose fashions of f eehng have been set by ininds oi: a "iJecidedly pessimistic order. But even in Protestantism they have been abundant enough ; and in its recent ' liberal ' developments of Unitarianism and latitudinarianism generally, minds of this order have played and still are playing leading and constructive parts.

Emerson himself is an' admirable example. Theodore Parker is another, — here are a couple of characteristic passages from Parker's correspondence.^ " Orthodox scholars say : ' In the heathen classics you find no consciousness of sin. It is very true — God be thanked for it.

They were conscious of wrath, of cruelty, avarice, drunkenness, lust, sloth, cowardice, and other actual vices, and struggled and got rid of the deformities, but they were not conscious of ^ I once heard a lady describe the pleasure it gave her to think that she " could always cuddle up to God. 2 John Weiss : Life of Theodore Parker, i. 152, 32.