“As the irritated waves dashed round us,” she writes, “I could not help experiencing a certain degree of satisfaction in my mind. I pleased myself with thinking that those mutinous billows, under the command of Him who does all things rightly, might probably furnish me with a watery grave. Perhaps I carried the point too far, in the pleasure which I took in thus seeing myself beaten and bandied by the swelling waters. Those who were with me took notice of my intrepidity.”170
The contempt of danger which religious enthusiasm produces may be even more buoyant still. I take an example from that charming recent autobiography, “With Christ at Sea,” by Frank Bullen. A couple of days after he went through the conversion on shipboard of which he there gives an account—
“It was blowing stiffly,” he writes, “and we were carrying a press of canvas to get north out of the bad weather. Shortly after four bells we hauled down the flying-jib, and I sprang out astride the boom to furl it. I was sitting astride the boom when suddenly it gave way with me. The sail slipped through my fingers, and I fell backwards, hanging head downwards over the seething tumult of shining foam under the ship’s bows, suspended by one foot. But I felt only high exultation in my certainty of eternal life. Although death was divided from me by a hair’s breadth, and I was acutely conscious of the fact, it gave me no sensation but joy. I suppose I could have hung there no longer than five seconds, but in that time I lived a whole age of delight. But my body asserted itself, and with a desperate gymnastic effort I regained the boom. How I furled the sail I don’t know, but I sang at the utmost pitch of my voice praises to God that went pealing out over the dark waste of waters.”171
The annals of martyrdom are of course the signal field of triumph for religious imperturbability. Let me cite as an example the statement of a humble sufferer, persecuted as a Huguenot under Louis XIV:—
“They shut all the doors,” Blanche Gamond writes, “and I saw six women, each with a bunch of willow rods as thick as the hand could hold, and a yard long. He gave me the order, ‘Undress yourself,’ which I did. He said, ‘You are leaving on your shift; you must take it off.’ They had so little patience that they took it off themselves, and I was naked from the waist up. They brought a cord with which they tied me to a beam in the kitchen. They drew the cord tight with all their strength and asked me, ‘Does it hurt you?’ and then they discharged their fury upon me, exclaiming as they struck me, ‘Pray now to your God.’ It was the Roulette woman who held this language. But at this moment I received the greatest consolation that I can ever receive in my life, since I had the honor of being whipped for the name of Christ, and in addition of being crowned with his mercy and his consolations. Why can I not write down the inconceivable influences, consolations, and peace which I felt interiorly? To understand them one must have passed by the same trial; they were so great that I was ravished, for there where afflictions abound grace is given superabundantly. In vain the women cried, ‘We must double our blows; she does not feel them, for she neither speaks nor cries.’ And how should I have cried, since I was swooning with happiness within?”172
The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of the personal centre of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down. This abandonment of self-responsibility seems to be the fundamental act in specifically religious, as distinguished from moral practice. It antedates theologies and is independent of philosophies. Mind-cure, theosophy, stoicism, ordinary neurological hygiene, insist on it as emphatically as Christianity does, and it is capable of entering into closest marriage with every speculative creed.173 Christians who have it strongly live in what is called “recollection,” and are never anxious about the future, nor worry over the outcome of the day. Of Saint Catharine of Genoa it is said that “she took cognizance of things, only as they were presented to her in succession, moment by moment.”
To her holy soul, “the divine moment was the present moment, … and when the present moment was estimated in itself and in its relations, and when the duty that was involved in it was accomplished, it was permitted to pass away as if it had never been, and to give way to the facts and duties of the moment which came after.”174
Hinduism, mind-cure, and theosophy all lay great emphasis upon this concentration of the consciousness upon the moment at hand.
The next religious symptom which I will note is what I have called Purity of Life. The saintly person becomes exceedingly sensitive to inner inconsistency or discord, and mixture and confusion grow intolerable. All the mind’s objects and occupations must be ordered with reference to the special spiritual excitement which is now its keynote. Whatever is unspiritual taints the pure water of the soul and is repugnant. Mixed with this exaltation of the moral sensibilities there is also an ardor of sacrifice, for the beloved deity’s sake, of everything unworthy of him. Sometimes the spiritual ardor is so sovereign that purity is achieved at a stroke—we have seen examples. Usually it is a more gradual conquest. Billy Bray’s account of his abandonment of tobacco is a good example of the latter form of achievement.
“I had been
