The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 137kind of a frame of things is it of which the best you can say is, " Thank God, it has let me off clear this time ! " Is not its blessedness a fragile fiction ? Is not your joy in it a very vulgar glee, not much unlike the snicker of any rogue at his success ? If indeed it were all success, even on such terms as that !

But^take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out aj. of ten Ips inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either ^Jr< his ideals in the hue of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of \which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.

When such a conquering optimist as Goethe can express himself in this wise, how must it be with less successful men ? " I will say nothing," writes Goethe in 1824, " against the course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.

What single-handed man was ever on the whole as successful a^ Luther ? yet when he had grown old, he looked back on his life as if it were an absolute failure. " I am utterly weary of life. I pray the Lord will come forthwith and carry me hence.

Let him come, above all, with his last Judgment : I will stretch out my neck, the thunder will burst forth, and I shall be at rest." — And having a necklace of white agates in his hand at the time he added : " O God, grant that it may come without delay.

I would readily eat up this necklace to-day, for the Judgment to come to-morrow." — The Electress Dowager, one day when Luther was dining with her, said to him : " Doctor, I wish you may live forty years to 2p. 138come. " Madam," replied he, " rather than live forty years more, I would give up my chance of Paradise. Failure, then, failure ! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damning emphasis does it then blot us out !

No easy fine, no mere apology or formal expiation, will satisfy the world's demands, but every pound of flesh exacted is soaked with all its blood. The subtlest forms of suffering known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to these results. And they are pivotal human experiences. A process so ubiquitous and everlasting is evidently an integral part of life.

" There is indeed one element in human destiny," Robert Louis Stevenson writes, " that not blindness ^^^ itself can controvert.

Whatever else we are intendedf to ^ do, we are not intended to succeed ; failure is the fate allotted." ^ And our nature being thus rooted in failure, is it any wonder that theologians should have held it to be essential, and thought that only through the personal experience of humiliation which it engenders the deeper sense of life's significance is reached?^ 1 He adds with characteristic healthy-mindedness : " Our business is to continue to fail in good spirits.

2 The^God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of this world. To our own consciousness there is usually a residuum of worth left over after our sins and errors have been told o£E — our capacity of acknowledging and regretting them is the germ of a better self m posse at least.

But the world deals with us in actu and not in posse: and of this hidden germ, not to be guessed at from without, it never takes account. Then we turn to the All-knower, who knows our bad, but knows this good in us also, and who is just. We cast ourselves with our repentance on his mercy : only by an All-knower can we finally be judged. So the need of a God very definitely emerges from this sort of experience of life.