The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 158[Yet] all this while as to the act of sinning, I never was more tender than now ; I durst not take a pin or stick, though but so big as a straw, for my conscience now was sore, and would smart at every touch ; I could not tell how to speak my words, for fear I should misplace them. Oh, how gingerly did I then go, in all I did or said !

I found myself as on a miry bog that shook if I did but stir ; and was as there left both by God and Christ, and the spirit, and all good things. " But my original and inward pollution, that was my plague and my affliction. By reason of that, I was more loathsome in my own eyes than was a toad ; and I thought I was so in God's eyes too. Sin and corruption, I said, would as naturally bubble out of my heart as water would bubble out of a fountain.

I could have changed heart with anybody. I thought none but the Devil himself could equal me for inward wickedness and / pollution of mind. Sure, thought I, I am forsaken of God ; and / thus I continued a long while, even for some years together. " And now I was sorry that God had made me a man.

The beasts, birds, fishes, etc., I blessed their condition, for they had not a sinful nature ; they were not obnoxious to the wrath of God; they were not to go to hell-fire after death. I could therefore have rejoiced, had my condition been as any of theirs.

Now I blessed the condition of the dog and toad, yea, gladly would I have been in the condition of the dog or horse, for I knew they had no soul to perish under the everlasting weight of Hell or Sin, as mine was like to do. Nay, and though I saw this, felt this, and was broken to pieces with it, yet that which added to my sorrow was, that I could not find with all my soul that I did desire deliverance. My heart was at times exceedingly hard.

If I would have given a thousand pounds for a tear, I could not shed one ; no, nor sometimes scarce desire to shed one. " I was both a burthen and a terror to myself ; nor did I ever so know, as now, what it was to be weary of my life, and yet afraid to die. How gladly would I have been anything but myself !

Anything but a man ! and in any condition but my own."i ' Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners : I have printed a number of detached passages continuously.

p. 159Poor patient Bunyan, like Tolstoy, saw the light again, but we must also postpone that part of his story to an- « other hour. In a later lecture I will also give the end ^ of the experience of Henry Alline, a devoted evangelist ^V4*>»** who worked in Nova Scotia a hundred years ago, and who thus vividly describes the high-water mark of the religious melancholy which formed its beginning. The type was not unHke Bunyan's.

" Everything I saw seemed to be a burden to me ; the earth seemed accursed for my sake : all trees, plants, rocks, hills, and vales seemed to be dressed in mourning- and groaning, under the weight of the curse, and everything around me seemed to be conspiring my ruin.

My sins seemed to be laid open ; so that 1 thought that every one I saw knew them, and sometimes I was almost ready to acknowledge many things, which I thought they knew : yea sometimes it seemed to me as if every one was pointing me out as the most guilty wretch upon earth.

I had now so great a sense of the vanity and emptiness of all things here below, that I knew the whole world could not possibly make me happy, no, nor the whole system of creation. When I waked in the morning, the first thought would be, Oh, my wretched soul, what shall I do, where shall I go ? And when I laid down, would say, I shall be perhaps in hell before morning.

I would many times look on the beasts with envy, wishing with all my heart I was in their place, that I might have no soul to lose ; and when I have seen birds flying over my head, have often thought within myself. Oh, that I could fly away from my danger and distress ! Oh, how happy should I be, if I were in their place ! " ^ Envy of the placid beasts seems to be a very widespread affection in this type of sadness.

The worst kind of melancholy is that which takes the * The Life and Journal of the Rev. Mr, Henry Alline, Boston, 1806, pp. 25, 26. I owe my acquaintance with this book to my colleague, Dr. Benjamin Rand.

p. 160form of panic fear. Here is an excellent example, for permission to print which I have to thank the sufferer. The original is in French, and though the subject was evidently in a bad nervous condition at the time of which he writes, his case has otherwise the merit of extreme simpHcity. I translate freely.

" Whilst in this state of philosophic pessimism and general depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight to procure some article that was there ; when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence.

Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing his entire figure.

He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. TJiat shape am 7, 1 felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him.

There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I t^ecame^a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me altogether.

I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never felt since.^ It was like a revelation ; and although the imme- ^ Compare Bunyan : " There was I struck into a very great trembling, insomuch that at some times I could, for days together, feel my very body, as well as my mind, to shake and totter under the sense of the dreadful judgment of God, that should fall on those that have sinned that most fearful and unpardonable sin. I felt also such clogging and heat at my stom-