The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
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p. 185personally always led, the cerebral life, the life of conventionality, artificiality, and personal ambition. He had been living wrongly and must change. To work for animal needs, to abjure lies and vanities, to relieve common wants, to be simple, to believe in God, therein lay happiness again. " I remember," he says, "one day in early spring, I was alone L . in the forest, lending my ear to its mysterious noises.
I listened, i A f A' V *" and my thought went back to what for these three years it always was busy with — the quest of God. But the idea of ^ * i him, I said, how did I ever come by the idea ? ', ^A**"^^"^ " And again there arose in me, with this thought, glad aspirations towards life. Everything in me awoke and received a meaning. . . . Why do I look farther ? a voice within me asked. He is there : he, without whom one cannot live.
Tq_ acknowledge God and to live are one and the same thing. God is what hfe is. Well, then ! live, seek God, and there will be no life without him. . . . " After this, things cleared up within me and about me better than ever, and the light has never wholly died away. I was saved from suicide. Just how or when the change took place I cannot tell.
But as insensibly and gradually as the force of life had been annulled within me, and I had reached my moral death-bed, just as gradually and imperceptibly did the energy of life come back. And what was strange was that this energy that came back was nothing new. It was my ancient juvenile force of faith, the belief that the sole purpose of my life was to be better.
I gave up the life of the conventional world, recognizing it to be no life, but a parody on life, which its superfluities simply keep us from comprehending," — and Tolstoy thereupon embraced the life of the peasants, and has felt right and happy, or at least relatively so, ever since.^ As I interpret his melancholy, then, it was not merely an accidental vitiation of his humors, though it was doubtless also that. It was logically called for by the clash * I have considerably abridged Tolstoy's words in my translation.
p. 186between his inner character and his outer activities and aims. Although a Hterary artist, Tolstoy was one of those primitive oaks of men to whom the superfluities and insincerities, the cupidities, complications, and cruelties of our polite civilization are profoundly unsatisfying, and for whom the eternal veracities He with more natural and animal things.
His crisis was the getting of his soul in order, the discovery of its genuine habitat and vocation, the escape from falsehoods into what for him were ways of truth. It was a case of heterogeneous personality tardily and slowly finding its unity and level. And though not many of us can imitate Tolstoy, not having enough, perhaps, of the aboriginal human marrow in our bones, most of us may at least feel as if it might be better for us if we could.
Bunyan's recovery seems to have been even slower. For years together he was alternately haunted with texts of Scripture, now up and now down, but at last with an ever growing relief in his salvation through the blood of Christ. " My peace would be in and out twenty times a day ; comfort now and trouble presently ; peace now and before I could go a furlong as full of guilt and fear as ever heart could hold.
When a good text comes home to him, " This," he writes, " gave me good encouragement for the space of two or three hours " ; or " This was a good day to me, I hope I shall not forget it " ; or " The glory of these words was then so weighty on me that I was ready to swoon as I sat ; yet not with grief and trouble, but with solid joy and peace " ; or " This made a strange seizure on my spirit ; it brought light with it, and commanded a silence in my heart of all those tumultuous thoughts that before did use, like masterless hell-hounds, fo roar and bellow and make a hideous noise within me.
It showed me that Jesus Christ had not quite forsaken and cast off my Soul. Such periods accumulate until he can write : " And now p. 187remained only the hinder part of the tempest, for the thunder was gone beyond me, only some drops would still remain, that now and then would fall upon me " ; — and at last : " Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed ; I was loosed from my afflictions and irons ; my temptations also fled away ; so that from that time, those dreadful Scriptures of God left off to trouble me ; now went I also home rejoicing, for the grace and love of God. . . .
Now could I see myself in Heaven and Earth at once ; in Heaven by my Christ, by my Head, by my Righteousness and Life, though on Earth by my body or person. . . . Christ was a precious Christ to my soul that night ; I could scarce lie in my bed for joy and peace and triumph through Christ.
Bunyan became a minister of the gospel, and in spite of his neurotic constitution, and of the twelve years he lay in prison for his non-conformity, his life was turned to active use. He was a peacemaker and doer of good, and the immortal Allegory which he w^rote has brought the v^ry spirit of religious patience home to English hearts. But neither Bunyan nor Tolstoy could become what we have called healthy-minded.
They had drunk too deeply of the cup of bitterness ever to forget its taste, and their redemption is into a universe two stories deep. Each of them realized a good which broke the effective edge of his sadness ; yet the sadness was preserved as a minor ingredient in the heart of the faith by which it was overcome.
The fact of interest for us is that as a matter of fact they could and did find something welling up in the inner reaches of their consciousness, by which such extreme sadness could be overcome.
Tolstoy does well to talk of it as tJiat hy which men live ; for that is exactly what it is, a stimulus, an excitement, a faith, a force that re-infuses the positive willingness to live, even in full presence of the evil perceptions that erewhile made life seem unbearable. For Tolstoy's perceptions of evil
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