The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 277together. It was pleasure, without the least sting, or any interruption. It was a sweetness, which my soul was lost in ; it seemed to be all that my feeble frame could sustain. There was but little difference, whether I was asleep or awake, but if there was any difference, the sweetness was greatest while I was asleep.^ As I awoke early the next morning, it seemed to me that I had entirely done with myself.

I felt that the opinions of the world concerning me were nothing, and that I had no more to do with any outward interest of my own than with that of a person whom I never saw. The glory of God seemed to swallow up every wish and desire of my heart. . . .

After retiring to rest and sleeping a little while, I awoke, and was led to reflect on God's mercy to me, in giving me, for many years, a willingness to die ; and after that, in making me willing to live, that I might do and suffer whatever he called me to here. \/' I also thought how God had graciously given me an entire resignation to his will, with respect to the kind and manner of death that I should die ; having been made willing to die on the rack, or at the stake, and if it were God's will, to die in darkness.

But now it occurred to me, I used to think of living no longer than to the ordinary age of man.

Upon this I was led to ask myself, whether I was not willing to be kept out of heaven even longer ; and my whole heart seemed immediately to reply : Yes, a thousand years, and a thousand in horror, if it be most for the honor of God, the torment of my body being so great, awful, and ovei'whelming that none could bear to live in the country where the spectacle was seen, and the torment of my mind being vastly greater.

And it seemed to me that I found a perfect willingness, quietness, and alacrity of soul in 1 Compare Madame Guyon : " It was my practice to arise at midnight for / purposes of devotion. ... It seemed to me that God came at the precise / time and woke me from sleep in order that I might enjoy him. When I was out of health or greatly fatigued, he did not awake me, but at such times I felt, even in my sleep, a singular possession of God.

He loved me so much that he seemed to pervade my being, at a time when I could be only imperfectly conscious of his presence. My sleep is sometimes broken, — a sort of half sleep ; but my soul seems to be awake enough to know God, when it is hardly capable of knowing anything else. T. C. Upham : The Life and Religious Experiences of Madame de la Mothe Guyon, New York, 1877, vol. i. p. 260.

p. 278consenting that it should be so, if it were most for the glory of God, so that there was no hesitation, doubt, or darkness in my mind. The glory of God seemed to overcome me and swallow me up, and every conceivable suffering, and everything that was terrible to my nature, seemed to shrink to nothing before it.

This resignation continued in its clearness and brightness the rest of the night, and all the next day, and the night following, and on Monday in the forenoon, without interruption or abatement." ^ The annals o£ Catholic saintship abound in records as ecstatic or more ecstatic than this. " Often the assaults of the divine love," it is said of the Sister Seraphique de la Martiniere, " reduced her almost to the point of death.

She used tenderly to complain of this to God. ' I cannot upport it/ she used to say. ' Bear gently with my weakness, or I shall expire under the violence of your love. " ^ Let me pass next to the Charity and Brotherly Love which are a usual fruit of saintliness, and have always been reckoned essential theological virtues, however limited may have been the kinds of service which the particular theology enjoined.

Brotherly love would follow logically from the assurance of God's friendly presence, the notion of our brotherhood as men being an immediate inference from that of God's fatherhood of us all.

When Christ utters the precepts : " Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you," he gives for a reason : " That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven : for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

One might therefore ^ I have considerably abridged the words of the original, which is given in Edwards's Narrative of the Revival in New England. 2 BouGAUD : Hist, de la Bienhenreuse Marguerite Marie, 1894, p. 125.

p. 279be tempted to explain both the humility as to one's self and the charity towards others which characterize spiritual excitement, as results of the all-leveling character of theistic belief. But these affections are certainly not mere derivatives of theism. We find them in Stoicism, in Hinduism, and in Buddhism in the highest possible degree.

They harmonize with paternal theism beautifully ; but they harmonize with all reflection whatever upon the dependence of mankind on general causes ; and we must, I think, consider them not subordinate but coordinate parts of that great complex excitement in the study of which we are engaged.

Religious rapture, moral enthusiasm, ontological wonder, cosmic emotion, are all unifying states of mind, in which the sand and grit of the selfhood incline to disappear, and tenderness to rule.

The best thing is to describe the condition integrally as a characteristic affection to which our nature is liable, a region in which we find ourselves at home, a sea in which we swim ; but not to pretend to explain its parts by deriving them too cleverly from one another. Like love or fear, the faithstate is a natural psychic complex, and carries charity with it by organic consequence.

Jubilation is an expansive affection, and all expansive affections are self-forgetful and kindly so long as they endure. We find this the case even when they are pathological in origin. In his instructive work, la Tristesse et la Joie,^ M. Georges Dumas compares together the melancholy and the joyous phase of circular insanity, and shows that, while selfishness characterizes the one, the other is marked by altruistic impulses.

No human being so stingy and useless as was Marie in her melancholy period ! But the moment the happy period begins, " sympathy and kindness become her characteristic sentiments. She displays 1 Paris, 1900.