The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 203Jesus, can you help me ? ' Never with mortal tongue can I describe that moment. Although up to that moment my soul had been filled with indescribable gloom, I felt the glorious brightness of the noonday sun shine into my heart. I felt I was a free man. Oh, the precious feeling of safety, of freedom, of resting on Jesus !

I felt that Christ with all his brightness and power had come into my life ; that, indeed, old things had passed away and all things had become new. " From that moment till now I have never wanted a drink of whiskey, and I have never seen money enough to make me take / one. I promised God that night that if he would take away the appetite for strong drink, I would work for him all my life.

He has done his part, and I have been trying to do mine." ^ Dr. Leuba rightly remarks that there is little doctrinal theology in such an experience, which starts with the absolute need o£ a higher helper, and ends with the sense that he has helped us. He gives other cases of drunkards'' conversions which are purely ethical, containing, as recorded, no theological beliefs whatever. John B.

Gough's case, for instance, is practically, says Dr. Leuba, the conversion of an atheist — neither God nor Jesus being mentioned.^ But in spite of the importance of this type of regeneration, with little or no intellectual readjustment, this writer surely makes it too exclusive. It corresponds to the subjectively centred form of morbid melancholy, of which Bunyan and Alline were examples.

But we saw in our seventh lecture that there are objective forms of melancholy also, in which the lack of rational ^ I have abridged Mr. Hadley's account. For other conversions of drunkards, see his pamphlet, Rescue Mission Work, published at the Old Jerry M'Auley Water Street Mission, New York city. A striking collection of cases also appears in the appendix to Professor Leuba's article.

2 A restaurant waiter served provisionally as Gough's ' Saviour. General Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, considers that the first vital \ step in saving outcasts consists in making them feel that some decent human \ being cares enough for them to take an interest in the question whether -' they are to rise or sink.

p. 204meaning of tlie universe, and of life anyhow, is the burden that weighs upon one — you remember Tolstoy's case.^ So there are distinct elements in conversion, and their relations to individual Hves deserve to be discriminated.^ Some persons, for instance, never are, and possibly never under any circumstances could be, converted. Eeligious ideas cannot become the centre of their spiritual energy.

They may be excellent persons, servants of God in practical ways, but they are not children of his kingdom. They are either incapable of imagining the invisible ; or else, in the language of devotion, they are ^> life-long subjects of * barrenness ' and * dryness. Such - inaptitude for religious faith may in some cases be intellectual in its origin.

Their religious faculties may be checked in their natural tendency to expand, by beliefs about the world that are inhibitive, the pessimistic and - materiahstic beliefs, for example, within which so many ^* ■ good souls, who in former times would have freely * indulged their religious propensities, find themselves nowadays, as it were, frozen ; or the agnostic vetoes upon faith as something weak and shameful, under which so many of us to-day lie cowering, afraid to use our instincts.

In many persons such inhibitions are never ' overcome. To the end of their days they refuse to \ believe, their personal energy never gets to its religious centre, and the latter remains inactive in perpetuity. In other persons the trouble is profounder. There are men ansesthetic on the religious side, deficient in that 1 The crisis of apathetic melancholy — no use in life — into which J. S.

Mill records that he fell, and from which he emerged by the reading of Marmontel's Memoirs (Heaven save the mark !) and Wordsworth's poetry, is another intellectual and general metaphysical case. See Mill's Autobiography, New York, 1873, pp. 141, 148. 2 Starbuck, in addition to * escape from sin,' discriminates • spiritual illumination ' as a distinct type of conversion experience. Psychology of Religion, p. 85.

p. 205category of sensibility. Just as a bloodless organism can never, in spite of all its goodwill, attain to the reckless ^ animal spirits ' enjoyed by those of sanguine temperament ; so the nature which is spiritually barren may admire and envy faith in others, but can never compass the enthusiasm and peace which those who are temperamentally qualified for faith enjoy.

All this may, however, turn out eventually to have been a matter of temporary inhibition. Even late in life some thaw, some release may take place, some bolt be shot back in the barrenest breast, and the man's hard heart may soften and break into religious feeling. Such cases more than any others suggest the idea that sudden conversion is by miracle. So long as they exist, we must not imagine ourselves to deal with irretrievably fixed classes.

Now there are two forms of mental occurrence in human beings, which lead to a striking difference in the conversion process, a difference to which Professor Starbuck has called attention. You know how it is when you try to recollect a forgotten name. Usually you help the recall by working for it, by mentally runnmg over the places, persons, and things with which the word was connected.

But sometimes this effort fails : you feel then as if the harder you tried the less hope there would be, as though the name were jammed, and pressure in its direction only kept it all the more from rising. And then the opposite expedient often succeeds.

Qiyejip the effort entirely ; think of something altogether different, and in half an hour the lost name comes sauntering mto / your mind, as Emerson says, as carelessly as if it had never been invited. Some hidden process was started in you by the effort, which went on after the effort ceased, and made the result come as if it came spontaneously.