The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
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p. 247come by far other channels than this conception. It is to the joyous conviction itself, the assurance that all is well with one, that he would give the name of faith par excellence. " When the sense of estrangement," he writes, " fencing man about in a narrowly limited ego, breaks down, the individual finds himself ' at one with all creation. He lives in the universal life ; he and man, he and nature, he and God, are one.
That state of confidence, trust, union with all things, following upon the achievement of moral unity, is the Faith- / state. Various dogmatic beliefs suddenly, on the advent of the faith-state, acquire a character of certainty, assume a new reality, become an object of faith. As the ground of assurance here is not rational, argumentation is irrelevant.
But such conviction being a mere casual offshoot of the faith-state, it is a gross error to imagine that the chief practical value of the faithstate is its power to stamp with the seal of reality certain particular theological conceptions.^ On the contrary, its value lies solely in the fact that it is the psychic correlate of a biological growth reducing contending desires to one direction ; a growth which expresses itself in new affective states and new reactions ; in larger, nobler, more Christ-like activities.
The ground of the specific assurance in religious dogmas is then an affective experience. The objects of faith may even be preposterous ; the affective stream will float them along, and invest them with unshakable certitude.
The more startling the affective experience, the less explicable it seems, the easier it is to make it the carrier of unsubstantiated notions," ^ The characteristics of the affective experience which, to avoid ambiguity, should, I think, be called the state of assurance rather than the faith-state, can be easily enumerated, though it is probably difficult to realize their ^ Tolstoy's ease was a good comment on those words.
There was almost no theology in his conversion. His faith-state was the sense come back that \ life was infinite in its moral significance. ^ ^ American Journal of Psychology, vii. 346-347, abridged.
p. 248intensity, unless one have been through the experience one's self. The central one is the loss of all the worry, the sense that all is ultimately well with one, the peace, the harmony, the willingness to he, even though the outer conditions should remain the same.
The certainty of God's ' grace,' of ' justification,' * salvation,' is an objective belief that usually accompanies the change in Christians ; but this may be entirely lacking and yet the affective peace remain the same — you will recollect the case of the Oxford graduate : and many might be given where the assurance of personal salvation was only a later result.
A passion of willingness, of acquiescence, of admiration, is the glowing centre of this state of mind. The second feature is the sense of perceiving truths not known before. The mysteries of life become lucid, as Professor Leuba says ; and often, nay usually, the solution is more or less unutterable in words. But these more intellectual phenomena may be postponed until we treat of mysticism.
A third peculiarity of the assurance state is the objective change which the world often appears to undergo.
' An appearance of newness beautifies every object,' the precise opposite of that other sort of newness, that dreadful unreality and strangeness in the appearance of the world, which is experienced by melancholy patients, and of which you may recall my relating some examples.^ This sense of clean and beautiful newness within and without is one of the commonest entries in conversion records.
Jonathan Edwards thus describes it in himself : — " After this my sense of divine things gradually increased, and became more and more lively, and had more of that inward sweetness. The appearance of everything was altered ; there 1 Above, p. 152, p. 249seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost everything. God's excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in everything ; in the sun, moon, and stars ; in the clouds and blue sky ; in the grass, flowers, and trees ; in the water and all nature ; which used greatly to fix my mind.
And scarce anything, among all the works of nature, was so sweet to me as thunder and lightning ; formerly nothing had been so terrible to me.
Before, I used to be uncommonly terrified with thunder, and to be struck with terror when I saw a thunderstorm rising ; but now, on the contrary, it rejoices me." ^ Billy Bray, an excellent little illiterate English evangelist, records his sense of newness thus : — " I said tro the Lord : ' Thou hast said, they that ask shall receive, they that seek shall find, and to them that knock the door shall be opened, and I have faith to believe it.
In an instant the Lord made me so happy that I cannot express what I felt. I shouted for joy. I praised God with my whole heart. ... I think this was in November, 1823, but what day of the month I do not know. I remember this, that everything looked new to me, the people, the fields, the cattle, the trees. I was like a new man in a new world.
I spent the greater part of my time in praising the Lord." ^ Starbuck and Leuba both illustrate this sense of newness by quotations. I take the two following from Starbuck's manuscript collection. One, a woman, says : — " I was taken to a camp-meeting, mother and religious friends seeking and praying for my conversion.
My emotional nature was stirred to its depths ; confessions of depravity and pleading with God for salvation from sin made me oblivious of all surroundings. I plead for mercy, and had a vivid realization of forgiveness and renewal of my nature. When rising from my knees I exclaimed, ' Old things have passed away,.allf things 1 DwiGHT : Life of Edwards, New York, 1830, p. 61, abridged. 2 W. F. Bourne : The King's Son, a Memoir of Billy Bray, London, Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1887, p. 9.
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