Once more, there are plenty of men, constitutionally sombre men, in whose religious life this rapturousness is lacking. They are religious in the wider sense; yet in this acutest of all senses they are not so, and it is religion in the acutest sense that I wish, without disputing about words, to study first, so as to get at its typical differentia. ↩
H. Ellis: The New Spirit, p. 232. ↩
I owe this allegorical illustration to my lamented colleague and friend, Charles Carroll Everett. ↩
Example:
“I have had much comfort lately in meditating on the passages which show the personality of the Holy Ghost, and his distinctness from the Father and the Son. It is a subject that requires searching into to find out, but, when realized, gives one so much more true and lively a sense of the fullness of the Godhead, and its work in us and to us, than when only thinking of the Spirit in its effect on us.”
Augustus Hare: Memorials, I 244, Maria Hare to Lucy H. Hare
Plato: Symposium, Jowett, 1871, I 527. ↩
Example:
“Nature is always so interesting, under whatever aspect she shows herself, that when it rains, I seem to see a beautiful woman weeping. She appears the more beautiful, the more afflicted she is.”
B. de St. Pierre
Journal of the S.P.R., February, 1895, p. 26. ↩
E. Gurney: Phantasms of the Living, I 384. ↩
L. Ackermann: Pensées d’un Solitaire, p. 66. ↩
Letters of Lowell, I 75. ↩
I borrow it, with Professor Flournoy’s permission, from his rich collection of psychological documents. ↩
Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance, London, 1885, pp. 196, 198. ↩
In his book (too little read, I fear), Natural Religion, 3rd edition, Boston, 1886, pp. 91, 122. ↩
C. Hilty: Glück, dritter Theil, 1900, p. 18. ↩
F. W. Newman: The Soul; Its Sorrows and Its Aspirations, 3rd edition, 1852, pp. 89, 91. ↩
I once heard a lady describe the pleasure it gave her to think that she “could always cuddle up to God.” ↩
John Weiss: Life of Theodore Parker, I 152, 32. ↩
Starbuck: Psychology of Religion, pp. 305, 306. ↩
“I know not to what physical laws philosophers will some day refer the feelings of melancholy. For myself, I find that they are the most voluptuous of all sensations,” writes Saint Pierre, and accordingly he devotes a series of sections of his work on Nature to the “Plaisirs de la Ruine,” “Plaisirs des Tombeaux,” “Ruines de la Nature,” “Plaisirs de la Solitude”—each of them more optimistic than the last.
This finding of a luxury in woe is very common during adolescence. The truth-telling Marie Bashkirtseff expresses it well:—
“In this depression and dreadful uninterrupted suffering, I don’t condemn life. On the contrary, I like it and find it good. Can you believe it? I find everything good and pleasant, even my tears, my grief. I enjoy weeping, I enjoy my despair. I enjoy being exasperated and sad. I feel as if these were so many diversions, and I love life in spite of them all. I want to live on. It would be cruel to have me die when I am so accommodating. I cry, I grieve, and at the same time I am pleased—no, not exactly that—I know not how to express it. But everything in life pleases me. I find everything agreeable, and in the very midst of my prayers for happiness, I find myself happy at being miserable. It is not I who undergo all this—my body weeps and cries; but something inside of me which is above me is glad of it all.”
Journal de Marie Bashkirtseff, I 67
R. M. Bucke: Cosmic Consciousness, pp. 182–186, abridged. ↩
I refer to The Conservator, edited by Horace Traubel, and published monthly at Philadelphia. ↩
W. Whitman: “Song of Myself,” 32. ↩
Homer: Iliad, XXI, E. Myers’s translation. ↩
“God is afraid of me!” remarked such a titanic-optimistic friend in my presence one morning when he was feeling particularly hearty and cannibalistic. The defiance of the phrase showed that a Christian education in humility still rankled in his breast. ↩
“As I go on in this life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burden. The prim, obliterated, polite surface of life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic—or maenadic—foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me.”
R. L. Stevenson: Letters, II 355
Cautionary Verses for Children: this title of a much used work, published early in the nineteenth century, shows how far the muse of evangelical protestantism in England, with her mind fixed on the idea of danger, had at last drifted away from the original gospel freedom. Mind-cure might be briefly called a reaction against all that religion of chronic anxiety which marked the earlier part of our century in the evangelical circles of England and America. ↩
I refer to Mr. Horatio W.
