Part 22 (1/2)
”Wo sind die Sorge nun und Noth Die mich noch gestern wollt' erschlaffen?
Ich scham' mich dess' im Morgenroth.”
The flood we are borne on rolls them so lightly under that their very contact is unfelt. Set free of them, we float and soar and sing. This auroral openness and uplift gives to all creative ideal levels a bright and caroling quality, which is nowhere more marked than where the controlling emotion is religious. ”The true monk,” writes an Italian mystic, ”takes nothing with him but his lyre.”
[147] See the case on p. 69, above, where the writer describes his experiences of communion with the Divine as consisting ”merely in the TEMPORARY OBLITERATION OF THE CONVENTIONALITIES which usually cover my life.”
We may now turn from these psychological generalities to those fruits of the religious state which form the special subject of our present lecture. The man who lives in his religious centre of personal energy, and is actuated by spiritual enthusiasms, differs from his previous carnal self in perfectly definite ways.
The new ardor which burns in his breast consumes in its glow the lower ”noes” which formerly beset him, and keeps him immune against infection from the entire groveling portion of his nature. Magnanimities once impossible are now easy; paltry conventionalities and mean incentives once tyrannical hold no sway. The stone wall inside of him has fallen, the hardness in his heart has broken down. The rest of us can, I think, imagine this by recalling our state of feeling in those temporary ”melting moods” into which either the trials of real life, or the theatre, or a novel sometimes throws us. Especially if we weep!
For it is then as if our tears broke through an inveterate inner dam, and let all sorts of ancient peccancies and moral stagnancies drain away, leaving us now washed and soft of heart and open to every n.o.bler leading. With most of us the customary hardness quickly returns, but not so with saintly persons. Many saints, even as energetic ones as Teresa and Loyola, have possessed what the church traditionally reveres as a special grace, the so-called gift of tears. In these persons the melting mood seems to have held almost uninterrupted control. And as it is with tears and melting moods, so it is with other exalted affections. Their reign may come by gradual growth or by a crisis; but in either case it may have ”come to stay.”
At the end of the last lecture we saw this permanence to be true of the general paramountcy of the higher insight, even though in the ebbs of emotional excitement meaner motives might temporarily prevail and backsliding might occur. But that lower temptations may remain completely annulled, apart from transient emotion and as if by alteration of the man's habitual nature, is also proved by doc.u.mentary evidence in certain cases. Before embarking on the general natural history of the regenerate character, let me convince you of this curious fact by one or two examples. The most numerous are those of reformed drunkards. You recollect the case of Mr. Hadley in the last lecture; the Jerry McAuley Water Street Mission abounds in similar instances.[148] You also remember the graduate of Oxford, converted at three in the afternoon, and getting drunk in the hay-field the next day, but after that permanently cured of his appet.i.te. ”From that hour drink has had no terrors for me: I never touch it, never want it. The same thing occurred with my pipe.... the desire for it went at once and has never returned. So with every known sin, the deliverance in each case being permanent and complete. I have had no temptations since conversion.”
[148] Above, p. 200. ”The only radical remedy I know for dipsomania is religiomania,” is a saying I have heard quoted from some medical man.
Here is an a.n.a.logous case from Starbuck's ma.n.u.script collection:--
”I went into the old Adelphi Theatre, where there was a Holiness meeting, ... and I began saying, 'Lord, Lord, I must have this blessing.' Then what was to me an audible voice said: 'Are you willing to give up everything to the Lord?' and question after question kept coming up, to all of which I said: 'Yes, Lord; yes, Lord!' until this came: 'Why do you not accept it NOW?' and I said: 'I do, Lord.'--I felt no particular joy, only a trust. Just then the meeting closed, and, as I went out on the street, I met a gentleman smoking a fine cigar, and a cloud of smoke came into my face, and I took a long, deep breath of it, and praise the Lord, all my appet.i.te for it was gone. Then as I walked along the street, pa.s.sing saloons where the fumes of liquor came out, I found that all my taste and longing for that accursed stuff was gone. Glory to G.o.d! ... [But] for ten or eleven long years [after that] I was in the wilderness with its ups and downs. My appet.i.te for liquor never came back.”
The cla.s.sic case of Colonel Gardiner is that of a man cured of s.e.xual temptation in a single hour. To Mr. Spears the colonel said, ”I was effectually cured of all inclination to that sin I was so strongly addicted to that I thought nothing but shooting me through the head could have cured me of it; and all desire and inclination to it was removed, as entirely as if I had been a sucking child; nor did the temptation return to this day.” Mr. Webster's words on the same subject are these: ”One thing I have heard the colonel frequently say, that he was much addicted to impurity before his acquaintance with religion; but that, so soon as he was enlightened from above, he felt the power of the Holy Ghost changing his nature so wonderfully that his sanctification in this respect seemed more remarkable than in any other.”[149]
[149] Doddridge's Life of Colonel James Gardiner, London Religious Tract Society, pp. 23-32.
Such rapid abolition of ancient impulses and propensities reminds us so strongly of what has been observed as the result of hypnotic suggestion that it is difficult not to believe that subliminal influences play the decisive part in these abrupt changes of heart, just as they do in hypnotism.[150] Suggestive therapeutics abound in records of cure, after a few sittings, of inveterate bad habits with which the patient, left to ordinary moral and physical influences, had struggled in vain.
Both drunkenness and s.e.xual vice have been cured in this way, action through the subliminal seeming thus in many individuals to have the prerogative of inducing relatively stable change. If the grace of G.o.d miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door, then. But just HOW anything operates in this region is still unexplained, and we shall do well now to say good-by to the PROCESS of transformation altogether--leaving it, if you like, a good deal of a psychological or theological mystery--and to turn our attention to the fruits of the religious condition, no matter in what way they may have been produced.[151]
[150] Here, for example, is a case, from Starbuck's book, in which a ”sensory automatism” brought about quickly what prayers and resolves had been unable to effect. The subject is a woman. She writes:--
”When I was about forty I tried to quit smoking, but the desire was on me, and had me in its power. I cried and prayed and promised G.o.d to quit, but could not. I had smoked for fifteen years. When I was fifty-three, as I sat by the fire one day smoking, a voice came to me.
I did not hear it with my ears, but more as a dream or sort of double think. It said, 'Louisa, lay down smoking.' At once I replied. 'Will you take the desire away?' But it only kept saying: 'Louisa, lay down smoking.' Then I got up, laid my pipe on the mantel-shelf, and never smoked again or had any desire to. The desire was gone as though I had never known it or touched tobacco. The sight of others smoking and the smell of smoke never gave me the least wish to touch it again.” The Psychology of Religion, p. 142.
[151] Professor Starbuck expresses the radical destruction of old influences physiologically, as a cutting off of the connection between higher and lower cerebral centres. ”This condition,” he says, ”in which the a.s.sociation-centres connected with the spiritual life are cut off from the lower, is often reflected in the way correspondents describe their experiences.... For example: 'Temptations from without still a.s.sail me, but there is nothing WITHIN to respond to them.' The ego [here] is wholly identified with the higher centres whose quality of feeling is that of withinness. Another of the respondents says: 'Since then, although Satan tempts me, there is as it were a wall of bra.s.s around me, so that his darts cannot touch me.'” --Unquestionably, functional exclusions of this sort must occur in the cerebral organ.
But on the side accessible to introspection, their causal condition is nothing but the degree of spiritual excitement, getting at last so high and strong as to be sovereign, and it must be frankly confessed that we do not know just why or how such sovereignty comes about in one person and not in another. We can only give our imagination a certain delusive help by mechanical a.n.a.logies.
If we should conceive, for example, that the human mind, with its different possibilities of equilibrium, might be like a many-sided solid with different surfaces on which it could lie flat, we might liken mental revolutions to the spatial revolutions of such a body. As it is pried up, say by a lever, from a position in which it lies on surface A, for instance, it will linger for a time unstably halfway up, and if the lever cease to urge it, it will tumble back or ”relapse”
under the continued pull of gravity. But if at last it rotate far enough for its centre of gravity to pa.s.s beyond surface A altogether, the body will fall over, on surface B, say, and abide there permanently. The pulls of gravity towards A have vanished, and may now be disregarded. The polyhedron has become immune against farther attraction from their direction.
In this figure of speech the lever may correspond to the emotional influences making for a new life, and the initial pull of gravity to the ancient drawbacks and inhibitions. So long as the emotional influence fails to reach a certain pitch of efficacy, the changes it produces are unstable, and the man relapses into his original att.i.tude.
But when a certain intensity is attained by the new emotion, a critical point is pa.s.sed, and there then ensues an irreversible revolution, equivalent to the production of a new nature.