The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 244by my reason and my will, which were themselves diseased, would be to act like a blind man who should pretend to correct one of his eyes by the aid of the other equally blind one.

I had then no resource save in some influence from without, I remembered the promise of the Holy Ghost ; and what the positive declarations of the Gospel had never succeeded in bringing home to me, I learned at last from necessity, and believed, for the first time in my life, in this promise, in the only sense in which it answered the needs of my soul, in that, namely, of a real external supernatural action, capable of giving me thoughts, and taking them away from me, and exerted on me by a God as truly master of my heart as he is of the rest of nature.

Renouncing then all merit, all strength, abandoning all my personal resources, and acknowledging no other title to his mercy than my own utter misery, I went home and threw myself on my knees, and prayed as I never yet prayed in my life. From this day onwards a new interior life began for me : not that my melancholy had disappeared, but it had lost its sting.

Hope had entered into my heart, and once entered on the path, the God of Jesus Christ, to whom I then had learned to give myself up, little by little did the rest." ^ It is needless to remind you once more of the admirable congruity of Protestant theology with the structure of the mind as shown in such experiences. In the extreme of melancholy the self that consciously is can do absolutely nothing.

It is completely bankrupt and without resource, and no works it can accomplish will avail. Redemption from such subjective conditions must be a free gift or nothing, and grace through Christ's accomplished sacrifice is such a gift.

" God," says Luther, " is the God of the humble, the miserable, the oppressed, and the desperate, and of those that are brought even to nothing ; and his nature is to give sight to the ^ I piece together a quotation made by W. Monod, in his book la Vie, and a letter printed in the work : Adolphe Monod : I., Souvenirs de sa Vie, 1885, p. 433.

p. 245blind, to comfort the broken-hearted, to justify sinners, to save the very desperate and damned. Now that pernicious and pestilent opinion of man's own righteousness, which will not be a sinner, unclean, miserable, and damnable, but righteous and holy, sufPereth not God to come to his own natural and proper work.

Therefore God must take this maul in hand (the law, I mean) to beat in pieces and bring to nothing this beast with her vain confidence, that she may so learn at length by her own misery that she is utterly forlorn and damned.

But here lieth the difficulty, that when a man is terrified and cast down, he is so little able to raise himself up again and say, ' Now I am bruised and afflicted enough ; now is the time of grace ; now is the time to hear Christ. The foolishness of man's heart is so great that then he rather seeketh to himself more laws to satisfy his conscience. ' If I live,' saith he, ' I will amend my life : I will do this, I will do that.

But here, except thou do the quite contrary, except thou send Moses away with his law, and in these terrors and this anguish lay hold upon Christ who died for thy sins, look for no salvation. Thy cowl, thy shaven crown, thy chastity, thy obedience, thy poverty, thy works, thy merits ? what shall all these do ? what shall the law of Moses avail?

If I, wretched and damnable sinner, through works or merits could have loved the Son of God, and so come to him, what needed he to deliver himself for me? If I, being a wretch and damned sinner, could be redeemed by any other price, what needed the Son of God to be given ?

But because there was no other price, therefore he delivered neither sheep, ox, gold, nor silver, but even God himself, entirely and wholly * for me,' even ' for me,' I say, a miserable, wretched sinner. Now, therefore, I take comfort and apply this to myself. And this manner of applying is the very true force and power of faith.

For he died not to justify the righteous, but the MTi-righteous, and to make them the children of God." ^ That is, the more literally lost you are, the more literally you are the very being whom Christ's sacrifice has already saved. Nothing in Catholic theology, I imagine, 1 Commentary on Galatiaus, ch. iii. verse 19, and ch. ii. verse 20, abridged.

p. 246has ever spoken to sick souls as straight as this message from Luther's personal experience.

As Protestants are not all sick souls, of course reliance on what Luther exults in calling the dung of one's merits, the filthy puddle of one's own righteousness, has come to the front again in their religion j but the adequacy of his view of Christianity to the deeper parts of our human mental structure is shown by its wildfire contagiousness when it was a new and quickening thing.

Faith that Christ has genuinely done his work was part of what Luther meant by faith, which so far is faith in a fact intellectually conceived of. But this is only one part of Luther's faith, the other part being far more vital.

This other part is something not intellectual but immediate and intuitive, the assurance, namely, that I, this individual I, just as I stand, without one plea, etc., am saved now and forever.^ Professor Leuba is undoubtedly right in contending that the conceptual belief about Christ's work, although so often efficacious and antecedent, is really accessory and non-essential, and that the * joyous conviction ' can also 1 In some conversions, both steps are distinct ; in this one, for example : — " Whilst I was reading the evangelical treatise, I was soon struck by an expression : ' the finished work of Christ.' * Why,' I asked of myself, ' does the author use these terms ?

Why does he not say " the atoning work " ? ' Then these words, ' It is finished,' presented themselves to my mind. ' What is it that is finished ? ' I asked, and in an instant my mind replied : ' A perfect expiation for sin ; entire satisfaction has been given ; the debt has been paid by the Substitute. Christ has died for our sins ; not for ours only, but for those of all men.

If, then, the entire work is finished, all the debt paid, what remains for me to do ? ' In another instant the light was shed through my mind by the Holy Ghost, and the joyous conviction was given me that nothing more was to be done, save to fall on my knees, to accept this Saviour and his love, to praise God forever. Autobiography of Hudson Taylor.

I translate back into English from the French translation of Challand (Geneva, no date), the original not being accessible.