The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 209Dr. Starbuck gives an interesting, and it seems to me a true, account — so far as conceptions so schematic can claim truth at all — of the reasons why self -surrender at the last moment should be so indispensable.

To begin with, there are two things in the mind of the candidate for conversion : first, the present incompleteness or wrongness, the * sin ' which he is eager to escape from ; and, second, the positive ideal which he longs to compass. Now with most of us the sense of our present wrongness is a far more distinct piece of our consciousness than is the imagination of any positive ideal we can aim at.

In a majority of cases, indeed, the ' sin ' almost exclusively engrosses the attention, so that conversion is " a process of strugglmg away from sin rather than of striving towards righteousness.'' ^ A man's conscious wit and will, so far as they strain towards the ideal, are aiming at something only dimly and inaccurately imagined.

Yet all the while the forces of mere organic ripening within him are going on towards their own prefigured result, and his conscious strainings are letting loose subconscious allies behind the scenes, which in their way work towards rearrangement; and the rearrangement towards which all these deeper forces tend is pretty surely definite, and definitely different from what he consciously conceives and determines.

It may consequently be actually interfered with (jammed, as it were, hke the lost word when we seek too energetically to recall it), by his voluntary efforts slanting from the true direction. Starbuck seems to put his finger on the root of the matter when he says that to exercise the personal will is still to live in the region where the imperfect self is the thing most emphasized. Where, on the contrary, the subconscious forces take the lead, it is more probably 1 Starbuck, p. 64.

p. 210the better self in posse which directs the operation. Instead of being clumsily and vaguely aimed at from without, it is then itself the organizing centre. What then must the person do ?

" He must relax," says Dr. Starbuck, — " that is, he must fall back on the larger Power that makes for righteousness, which has been welling up in his own being, and let it finish in its own way the work it has begun. . . .

The act of yielding, in this point of view, is giving one's self over to the new life, making it the centre of a new personality, and living, from within, the truth of it which had before been viewed objectively." ^ *' Man's extremity is God's opportunity " is the theological way of putting this fact of the need of self-surrender ; whilst the physiological way of stating it would be, " Let one do all in one's power, and one's nervous system will do the rest.

Both statements acknowledge the same fact.^ To state it in terms of .our own symbolism : When the new centre of personal energy has been subconsciously incubated so long as to be just ready to open into flower, ' hands off ' is the only word for us, it must burst forth unaided ! We have used the vague and abstract language of psychology.

But since, in any terms, the crisis described is the throwing of our conscious selves upon the mercy of powers which, whatever they may be, are more ideal than we are actually, and make for our redemption, you see why self-surrender has been and always must be regarded as the vital turning-point of the religious life, so far as the religious life is spiritual and no affair of outer works and ritual and sacraments. One may say that the whole development of Christianity in inwardness ^ Stakbuck, p. 115. 2 Starbuck, p. 113.

p. 211has consisted in little more than the greater and greater emphasis attached to this crisis of seK-surrender.

From Catholicism to Lutheranism, and then to Calvinism ; from that to Wesleyauism ; and from this, outside of technical Christianity altogether, to pure ' liberalism ' or transcendental idealism, whether or not of the mind-cure type, taking in the mediaeval mystics, the quietists, the pietists, and quakers by the way, we can trace the stages of progress towards the idea of an immediate spiritual help, experienced by the individual in his forlornness and standing in no essential need of doctrinal apparatus or propitiatory machinery.

Psychology and religion are thus in perfect harmony up to this point, since both admit that there are forces seemingly outside of the conscious individual that bring redemption to his life.

Nevertheless psychology, defining these forces as * subconscious,' and speaking of their effects as due to ' incubation,' or ' cerebration,' implies that they do not transcend the individual's personality ; and herein she diverges from Christian theology, which insists that they are direct supernatural operations of the Deity.

I propose to you that we do not yet consider this divergence final, but leave the question for a while in abeyance — continued inquiry may enable us to get rid of some of the apparent discord. Revert, then, for a moment more to the psychology of self-surrender.

When you find a man living on the ragged edge of his consciousness, pent in to his sin and want and incompleteness, and consequently inconsolable, and then simply tell him that all is well with him, that he must stop his worry, break with his discontent, and give up his anxiety, you seem to him to come with pure absurdities. The