Part 17 (1/2)
”An athlete ... sometimes awakens suddenly to an understanding of the fine points of the game and to a real enjoyment of it, just as the convert awakens to an appreciation of religion. If he keeps on engaging in the sport, there may come a day when all at once the game plays itself through him--when he loses himself in some great contest. In the same way, a musician may suddenly reach a point at which pleasure in the technique of the art entirely falls away, and in some moment of inspiration he becomes the instrument through which music flows. The writer has chanced to hear two different married persons, both of whose wedded lives had been beautiful from the beginning, relate that not until a year or more after marriage did they awake to the full blessedness of married life. So it is with the religious experience of these persons we are studying.”[109]
[109] Psychology of Religion, p. 385. Compare, also, pp. 137-144 and 262.
We shall erelong hear still more remarkable ill.u.s.trations of subconsciously maturing processes eventuating in results of which we suddenly grow conscious. Sir William Hamilton and Professor Layc.o.c.k of Edinburgh were among the first to call attention to this cla.s.s of effects; but Dr. Carpenter first, unless I am mistaken, introduced the term ”unconscious cerebration,” which has since then been a popular phrase of explanation. The facts are now known to us far more extensively than he could know them, and the adjective ”unconscious,”
being for many of them almost certainly a misnomer, is better replaced by the vaguer term ”subconscious” or ”subliminal.”
Of the volitional type of conversion it would be easy to give examples,[110] but they are as a rule less interesting than those of the self-surrender type, in which the subconscious effects are more abundant and often startling. I will therefore hurry to the latter, the more so because the difference between the two types is after all not radical. Even in the most voluntarily built-up sort of regeneration there are pa.s.sages of partial self-surrender interposed; and in the great majority of all cases, when the will had done its uttermost towards bringing one close to the complete unification aspired after, it seems that the very last step must be left to other forces and performed without the help of its activity. In other words, self-surrender becomes then indispensable. ”The personal will,” says Dr. Starbuck, ”must be given up. In many cases relief persistently refuses to come until the person ceases to resist, or to make an effort in the direction he desires to go.”
[110] For instance, C. G. Finney italicizes the volitional element: ”Just at this point the whole question of Gospel salvation opened to my mind in a manner most marvelous to me at the time. I think I then saw, as clearly as I ever have in my life, the reality and fullness of the atonement of Christ. Gospel salvation seemed to me to be an offer of something to be accepted, and all that was necessary on my part to get my own consent to give up my sins and accept Christ. After this distinct revelation had stood for some little time before my mind, the question seemed to be put, 'will you accept it now, to-day?' I replied, 'Yes; I will accept it to-day, or I will die in the attempt!'” He then went into the woods, where he describes his struggles. He could not pray, his heart was hardened in its pride. ”I then reproached myself for having promised to give my heart to G.o.d before I left the woods.
When I came to try, I found I could not.... My inward soul hung back, and there was no going out of my heart to G.o.d. The thought was pressing me, of the rashness of my promise that I would give my heart to G.o.d that day, or die in the attempt. It seemed to me as if that was binding on my soul; and yet I was going to break my vow. A great sinking and discouragement came over me, and I felt almost too weak to stand upon my knees. Just at this moment I again thought I heard some one approach me, and I opened my eyes to see whether it were so. But right there the revelation of my pride of heart, as the great difficulty that stood in the way, was distinctly shown to me. An overwhelming sense of my wickedness in being ashamed to have a human being see me on my knees before G.o.d took such powerful possession of me, that I cried at the top of my voice, and exclaimed that I would not leave that place if all the men on earth and all the devils in h.e.l.l surrounded me. 'What!' I said, 'such a degraded sinner as I am, on my knees confessing my sins to the great and holy G.o.d; and ashamed to have any human being, and a sinner like myself, find me on my knees endeavoring to make my peace with my offended G.o.d!' The sin appeared awful, infinite. It broke me down before the Lord.” Memoirs, pp.
14-16, abridged.
”I had said I would not give up; but when my will was broken, it was all over,” writes one of Starbuck's correspondents.-- Another says: ”I simply said: 'Lord, I have done all I can; I leave the whole matter with Thee,' and immediately there came to me a great peace.”--Another: ”All at once it occurred to me that I might be saved, too, if I would stop trying to do it all myself, and follow Jesus: somehow I lost my load.”--Another: ”I finally ceased to resist, and gave myself up, though it was a hard struggle. Gradually the feeling came over me that I had done my part, and G.o.d was willing to do his.”[111]--”Lord Thy will be done; d.a.m.n or save!” cries John Nelson,[112] exhausted with the anxious struggle to escape d.a.m.nation; and at that moment his soul was filled with peace.
[111] Starbuck: Op. cit., pp. 91, 114.
[112] Extracts from the Journal of Mr. John Nelson, London, no date, p.
24.
Dr. Starbuck gives an interesting, and it seems to me a true, account--so far as conceptions so schematic can claim truth at all--of the reasons why self-surrender at the last moment should be so indispensable. To begin with, there are two things in the mind of the candidate for conversion: first, the present incompleteness or wrongness, the ”sin” which he is eager to escape from; and, second, the positive ideal which he longs to compa.s.s. Now with most of us the sense of our present wrongness is a far more distinct piece of our consciousness than is the imagination of any positive ideal we can aim at. In a majority of cases, indeed, the ”sin” almost exclusively engrosses the attention, so that conversion is ”a process of struggling away from sin rather than of striving towards righteousness.”[113] A man's conscious wit and will, so far as they strain towards the ideal, are aiming at something only dimly and inaccurately imagined. Yet all the while the forces of mere organic ripening within him are going on towards their own prefigured result, and his conscious strainings are letting loose subconscious allies behind the scenes, which in their way work towards rearrangement; and the rearrangement towards which all these deeper forces tend is pretty surely definite, and definitely different from what he consciously conceives and determines. It may consequently be actually interfered with (JAMMED, as it were, like the lost word when we seek too energetically to recall it), by his voluntary efforts slanting from the true direction.
[113] Starbuck, p. 64.
Starbuck seems to put his finger on the root of the matter when he says that to exercise the personal will is still to live in the region where the imperfect self is the thing most emphasized. Where, on the contrary, the subconscious forces take the lead, it is more probably the better self in posse which directs the operation. Instead of being clumsily and vaguely aimed at from without, it is then itself the organizing centre. What then must the person do? ”He must relax,”
says Dr. Starbuck--”that is, he must fall back on the larger Power that makes for righteousness, which has been welling up in his own being, and let it finish in its own way the work it has begun.... The act of yielding, in this point of view, is giving one's self over to the new life, making it the centre of a new personality, and living, from within, the truth of it which had before been viewed objectively.”[114]
[114] Starbuck, p. 115.
”Man's extremity is G.o.d's opportunity” is the theological way of putting this fact of the need of self-surrender; whilst the physiological way of stating it would be, ”Let one do all in one's power, and one's nervous system will do the rest.” Both statements acknowledge the same fact.[115]
[115] Starbuck, p. 113.
To state it in terms of our own symbolism: When the new centre of personal energy has been subconsciously incubated so long as to be just ready to open into flower, ”hands off” is the only word for us, it must burst forth unaided!
We have used the vague and abstract language of psychology. But since, in any terms, the crisis described is the throwing of our conscious selves upon the mercy of powers which, whatever they may be, are more ideal than we are actually, and make for our redemption, you see why self-surrender has been and always must be regarded as the vital turning-point of the religious life, so far as the religious life is spiritual and no affair of outer works and ritual and sacraments. One may say that the whole development of Christianity in inwardness has consisted in little more than the greater and greater emphasis attached to this crisis of self-surrender. From Catholicism to Lutheranism, and then to Calvinism; from that to Wesleyanism; and from this, outside of technical Christianity altogether, to pure ”liberalism” or transcendental idealism, whether or not of the mind-cure type, taking in the mediaeval mystics, the quietists, the pietists, and quakers by the way, we can trace the stages of progress towards the idea of an immediate spiritual help, experienced by the individual in his forlornness and standing in no essential need of doctrinal apparatus or propitiatory machinery.
Psychology and religion are thus in perfect harmony up to this point, since both admit that there are forces seemingly outside of the conscious individual that bring redemption to his life. Nevertheless psychology, defining these forces as ”subconscious,” and speaking of their effects, as due to ”incubation,” or ”cerebration,” implies that they do not transcend the individual's personality; and herein she diverges from Christian theology, which insists that they are direct supernatural operations of the Deity. I propose to you that we do not yet consider this divergence final, but leave the question for a while in abeyance--continued inquiry may enable us to get rid of some of the apparent discord.
Revert, then, for a moment more to the psychology of self-surrender.