text:
Page:The Holy Bible, containing the Old & New Testament & the Apocrypha.djvu/985

IV] : (for Beeroth also was reckoned to Benjamin: and the Beerothites fled to Gittaim, and were sojourners there until this day.) And Jonathan, Saul's son, had a son that was lame of his feet. He was five years old when the tidings came of Saul and Jonathan out of Jezreel, and his nurse took him up, and fled: and it came to pass, as she made haste to flee, that he fell, and became lame. And his name was Mephibosheth. And the sons of Rimmon the Beerothite, Rechab and Baanah, went, and came about the heat of the day to the house of Ish-bosheth, who lay on a bed at noon. And they came thither into the midst of the house, as though they would have fetched wheat; and they smote him under the fifth rib: and Rechab and Baanah his brother escaped. For when they came into the house, he lay on his bed in his bedchamber, and they smote him, and slew him, and beheaded him, and took his head, and gat them away through the plain all night. And they brought the head of Ish-bosheth unto David to Hebron, and said to the king, Behold the head of Ish-bosheth the son of Saul thine enemy, which sought thy life; and the Lord hath avenged my lord the king this day of Saul, and of his seed. And David answered Rechab and Baanah his brother, the sons of Rimmon the Beerothite, and said unto them, As the Lord liveth, who hath redeemed my soul out


text:
Page:Auerbach-Spinozanovel.djvu/346

324 stools, and not letting any of them be moved without a regular storm? Did you never see that beautiful white Amaryllis that the blessed Magister was so fond of? It disappeared from the day of his death, though such animals generally stick to a house, not to the people in it. I would give a good deal to see it back again; I should be sorry from my heart if anything happened to it. Ay, and it was so knowing, it could tell to a minute when the raw meat was brought, and we were never bothered with mice."

Spinoza regretted he had nowhere seen the cat.

If we have again given too much space to the chatter of an old woman, we may bear with her loquacity a little in consideration of the motherly care which she took of our philosopher.

Spinoza, whose two brothers-in-law found themselves deceived in their expectations, was obliged to take legal means for the division of his father's inheritance. When he had obtained his legal rights he voluntarily gave up his share, keeping only a single bed with its necessary hangings, which he had taken with his work-bench and his few books and clothes to the house' of Klaas Ufmsand. Here at last he was permitted to order his outer life in perfect conformity with the requirements of his spiritual nature. The serene equanimity derived from conviction, which opposes tranquil

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Page:Auerbach-Spinozanovel.djvu/346


text:
Page:The Holy Bible, containing the Old & New Testament & the Apocrypha.djvu/986

Rh of all adversity, when one told me, saying, Behold, Saul is dead, thinking to have brought good tidings, I took hold of him, and slew him in Ziklag, who thought that I would have given him a reward for his tidings: how much more, when wicked men have slain a righteous person in his own house upon his bed? shall I not therefore now require his blood of your hand, and take you away from the earth? And David commanded his young men, and they slew them, and cut off their hands and their feet, and hanged them up over the pool in Hebron. But they took the head of Ish-bosheth, and buried it in the sepulchre of Abner in Hebron.

came all the tribes of Israel to David unto Hebron, and spake, saying, Behold, we are thy bone and thy flesh. Also in time past, when Saul was king over us, thou wast he that leddest out and broughtest in Israel: and the Lord said to thee, Thou shalt feed my people Israel, and thou shalt be a captain over Israel. So all the elders of Israel came to the king to Hebron; and king David made a league with them in Hebron before the Lord: and they anointed David king over Israel.

David was thirty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned forty years. In Hebron he reigned over Judah seven years and six months: and in


text:
Page:Auerbach-Spinozanovel.djvu/347

Rh to the stormy excitement of the decisive moments of existence, as well as to the annoyances and the restless struggles of every-day life; that self-dependence, won by cheerful renunciation of the intoxications of empty, exhausting pleasures; that exaltation and satisfaction in the kingdom of intellect, a peace of mind won after hot conflict, a clear penetration of the world, whose enigmas were solved, and eternal laws discovered; these were the benefits which he made ever more plainly and firmly his own in solitude.

From early morning he sat working at his bench. As he snipped a piece from his glass with the sharp diamond, he broke an idea off from the great system that lay complete though undeveloped in himself. When he worked the leaden plate and gave the glass its proper form the idea in him gained firmer shape, and so on through all the stages; ever more distinct the form, ever more transparent the material. Many splinters must fall, many rough places be smoothed, till at last the truth should be reflected in the mirror. When he had earned his bread by the day's handiwork, in the quiet night by his single lamp he placed his finely polished ideas before him, collected the dust which had fallen from them, and strewed it thereon, that they became opaque; then with a light hand wiped it off, and proved that it did not necessarily belong there, and that he had but hidden the light, not

title: Page:Auerbach-Spinozanovel.djvu/347


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/70

 idea. It has been vouchsafed, for example, to very few Christian believers to have had a sensible vision of their Saviour; though enough appearances of this sort are on record, by way of miraculous exception, to merit our attention later. The whole force of the Christian religion, therefore, so far as belief in the divine personages determines the prevalent attitude of the believer, is in general exerted by the instrumentality of pure ideas, of which nothing in the individual's past experience directly serves as a model.

But in addition to these ideas of the more concrete religious objects, religion is full of abstract objects which prove to have an equal power. God's attributes as such, his holiness, his justice, his mercy, his absoluteness, his infinity, his omniscience, his tri-unity, the various mysteries of the redemptive process, the operation of the sacraments, etc., have proved fertile wells of inspiring meditation for Christian believers. We shall see later that the absence of definite sensible images is positively insisted on by the mystical authorities in all religions as the sine qua non of a successful orison, or contemplation of the higher divine truths. Such contemplations are expected (and abundantly verify the expectation, as we shall also see) to influence the believer's subsequent attitude very powerfully for good.

Immanuel Kant held a curious doctrine about such objects of belief as God, the design of creation, the soul, its freedom, and the life hereafter. These things, he said,


text:
Page:Auerbach-Spinozanovel.djvu/348

326 it. So worked, so philosophized Benedict de Spinoza.

Not long after his withdrawal from the busy world he had to break off some hours a day from his manual labor to lead a younger mind in the paths of philosophy. Meyer one day brought young Simon de Vries to him, who, since the short view we had of him before, had become the lucky heir of the rich results of his father's speculations in tea, and now gave himself up to quite other speculations. Spinoza took him through a course on the principles of Descartes' philosophy. In the same room where he had once learned to decline mensa, in the same chair in which his master had once sat to correct his exercises, he now sat to teach the philosophy of Descartes, and build yet higher on the same foundation, as the necessities of that method required. Honorable Dodimus de Vries, who had once been able to do quickly the most complicated mental arithmetic, had not only left his numerous and weighty ducats to his son Simon, but also his arithmetical readiness. This youthful talent for mathematics gave Spinoza much pleasure.

For two or three days at a time, and often much longer, he never left his room; he never willingly left the familiar solitude in which he felt so much at ease, in which the hours and days like quiet streams flowed refreshingly and animatingly past him.

title: Page:Auerbach-Spinozanovel.djvu/348


text:
Page:The Holy Bible, containing the Old & New Testament & the Apocrypha.djvu/987

V] he reigned thirty and three years over all Israel and Judah.

And the king and his men went to Jerusalem unto the Jebusites, the inhabitants of the land: which spake unto David, saying, Except thou take away the blind and the lame, thou shalt not come in hither: thinking, David cannot come in hither. Nevertheless David took the strong hold of Zion: the same is the city of David. And David said on that day, Whosoever getteth up to the gutter, and smiteth the Jebusites, and the lame and the blind, that are hated of David's soul, he shall be chief and captain. Wherefore they said, The blind and the lame shall not come into the house. So David dwelt in the fort, and called it the city of David, And David built round about from Millo and inward. And David went on, and grew great, and the Lord God of hosts was with him.

And Hiram king of Tyre sent messengers to David, and cedar trees, and carpenters, and masons: and they built David an house. And David perceived that the Lord had established him king over Israel, and that he had exalted his kingdom for his people Israel's sake.

And David took him more concubines and wives out of Jerusalem, after he was come from Hebron: and there were yet sons and daughters born to


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/71

 are properly not objects of knowledge at all. Our conceptions always require a sense-content to work with, and as the words 'soul,' 'God,' 'immortality,' cover no distinctive sense-content whatever, it follows that theoretically speaking they are words devoid of any significance. Yet strangely enough they have a definite meaning for our practice. We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life. Our faith that these unintelligible objects actually exist proves thus to be a full equivalent in praktischer Hinsicht, as Kant calls it, or from the point of view of our action, for a knowledge of what they might be, in case we were permitted positively to conceive them. So we have the strange phenomenon, as Kant assures us, of a mind believing with all its strength in the real presence of a set of things of no one of which it can form any notion whatsoever.

My object in thus recalling Kant's doctrine to your mind is not to express any opinion as to the accuracy of this particularly uncouth part of his philosophy, but only to illustrate the characteristic of human nature which we are considering, by an example so classical in its exaggeration. The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our object of belief that our whole life is polarized through and through, so to speak, by its sense of the existence of the thing believed in, and yet that thing, for purpose of definite description, can hardly be said to be present to our mind at all. It is as if a bar of iron, without touch or sight, with no representative faculty whatever, might nevertheless be strongly endowed with an inner capacity for magnetic feeling; and as if, through the various arousals of its magnetism by magnets coming


text:
Page:Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies.djvu/91

1832.] across the island: it was planted on each side with native shrubs, and rendered firm by pieces of the trunks of tree-ferns, cut in lengths, and laid at short distances one from another; of these, some of the steps were also formed on the steepest part of the ascent. The huts were almost overgrown with the Macquarie Harbour Vine, a luxuriant climber, bearing small acid fruit. We walked over the island, and down one of its sides, which was woody, and which exhibited the finest tree-ferns we had seen, and in great profusion. They were of two kinds, one of which we did not meet with elsewhere Some of their larger fronds or leaves were thirteen feet long, making the diameter of the crest twenty-six feet. The stems were of all degrees of elevation, up to twenty-five or thirty feet; some of them, at the lower part, were as stout as a man's body: those of Cybotium Billardieri were covered with roots to the outside: the whole length of those of the other species—Alsophila australis—was clothed with the bases of old leaves, which were rough, like the stems of raspberries, closely tiled over each other, and pointing upwards. There was also a number of other ferns of humble growth: two species of the beautiful genus Glichenia had tough, wiry stems, which were used in the settlement, for making bird-cages.

The general health of the prisoners at Macquarie Harbour was good. Seldom more than three of them were in the hospital at a time. The average of deaths did not amount to more than one in 35 per annum, including those by violence and accident. These circumstances, the more remarkable in men whose habits had been dissipated, might reasonably be attributed to spare diet and hard labour, in a mild though humid climate, and seclusion from strong drink. But whether from the limited supply of food, or from being restricted to the use of salt meat, or from some other cause, the surgeon remarked, that when the men became ill, the tone of their constitution was so low that they were difficult to recover. Some of them were affected with scurvy for long after leaving the settlement.

The common temperature of the winter at Macquarie Harbour, was 43° in clear weather, when the wind was from


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/72

 and going in its neighborhood, it might be consciously determined to different attitudes and tendencies. Such a bar of iron could never give you an outward description of the agencies that had the power of stirring it so strongly; yet of their presence, and of their significance for its life, it would be intensely aware through every fibre of its being.

It is not only the Ideas of pure Reason, as Kant styled them, that have this power of making us vitally feel presences that we are impotent articulately to describe. All sorts of higher abstractions bring with them the same kind of impalpable appeal. Remember those passages from Emerson which I read at my last lecture. The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims, not only for such a transcendentalist writer, but for all of us, in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas, that lend it its significance. As time, space, and the ether soak through all things, so (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance, justice, soak through all things good, strong, significant, and just.

Such ideas, and others equally abstract, form the background for all our facts, the fountain-head of all the possibilities we conceive of. They give its 'nature,' as we call it, to every special thing. Everything we know is 'what' it is by sharing in the nature of one of these abstractions. We can never look directly at them, for they are bodiless and featureless and footless, but we grasp all other things by their means, and in handling the real world we should be stricken with helplessness in just so far forth as we might lose these mental objects, these adjectives and adverbs and predicates and heads of classification and conception.

This absolute determinability of our mind by


text:
Page:Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies.djvu/92

56 the south, and 52° when cloudy with the wind from the north. Frost and great heat were of rare occurrence. Rain was said to have fallen on five days out of seven, during ten months in the year, from the formation of the settlement in 1822.

The prisoners had no allowance of spirits at this station; but rewards for little extra services were sometimes given them by the officers, in this pernicious article; the allowance of which to the latter and to the military generally, was a great evil, and the source of much misconduct.

Several of the prisoners who returned to Hobart Town in the Tamar, had been first transported to Bermuda; but in consequence of a mutiny in which they were implicated, they were subsequently sent to V. D. Land. They preferred Bermuda, because they had there an allowance of fresh meat and rum, and some money for present use, as well as a sum reserved till the expiration of their sentence.

During our stay at Macquarie Harbour, we received great kindness and attention from the Commandant, who afforded us all the information we desired respecting the discipline of the Settlement, and gave us free access to the prisoners, both for ascertaining their feelings, and for the purpose of imparting religious instruction. The other officers also were kindly attentive. On the 21st of the 6th month, we left them with feelings of gratitude, not soon to be effaced, and sailed to Wellington Head, near the entrance of the harbour; having in the jail several prisoners returning from the settlement; they were not under strict guard, as the vessel was proceeding in the direction in which they desired to go, and had no stock of provisions on board to tempt them to try to carry her off.

The wind proving unfavourable, we were detained eighteen days at Wellington Head; in the course of which we visited the Pilot Station, and adjacent parts of the coast; and daily had religious opportunities in the jail, with the crew of the vessel, the military, and the prisoners. The jail was now so much occupied with timber as to render it difficult to crowd into it, and it was also dirty and dark; and the only


text:
Page:The Holy Bible, containing the Old & New Testament & the Apocrypha.djvu/988

Rh. And these be the names of those that were born unto him in Jerusalem; Shammuah, and Shobab, and Nathan, and Solomon, Ibhar also, and Elishua, and Nepheg, and Japhia, and Elishama, and Eliada, and Eliphalet.

But when the Philistines heard that they had anointed David king over Israel, all the Philistines came up to seek David; and David heard of it, and went down to the hold. The Philistines also came and spread themselves in the valley of Rephaim. And David enquired of the Lord, saying, Shall I go up to the Philistines? wilt thou deliver them into mine hand? And the Lord said unto David, Go up: for I will doubtless deliver the Philistines into thine hand. And David came to Baal-perazim, and David smote them there, and said, The Lord hath broken forth upon mine enemies before me, as the breach of waters. Therefore he called the name of that place Baal-perazim. And there they left their images, and David and his men burned them.

And the Philistines came up yet again, and spread themselves in the valley of Rephaim. And when David enquired of the Lord, he said, Thou shalt not go up; but fetch a compass behind them, and come upon them over against the mulberry trees. And let it be, when thou hearest the sound of a going in the tops


text:
Page:Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies.djvu/93

1832.] lamp we had, gave barely sufficient light to read by; but the comforting sense of our Heavenly Father's love, which often attended our minds, made up for all privations. One of the prisoners, who, for some time past had exhibited much religious thoughtfulness, a few times joined his exhortations to ours, and pleaded with his fellows, on the necessity of preparing for the awful day of the Lord. He began by telling them, that they had known him when he indulged in sin as much as any of them; but that they must have marked the change which had taken place in his conduct and character; and he could assure them, that he was much happier in walking in the fear of the Lord than ever he had been in sin; he therefore entreated them to turn to the Lord and seek mercy through that Saviour, in whom he had found mercy.

The person acting as steward on board the Tamar was transported when 14 years old. He attributed his early turpitude, to the influence of had company, which led him to use strong drink and disobey his father, and to practice many other evils. When gambling with his associates on a First-day, at the suggestion of one of the party, they robbed a young man who happened to pass. For this offence several of them were transported. Though he had forsaken his evil ways and was now filling an honourable post, he still felt keenly the bitter consequences of his former vices, for which he was still in bondage.

6th mo. 22nd. We had the crew of the pilot-boat assembled, along with the persons on board the Tamar, and, after reading a portion of Scripture to them, spoke on the importance of avoiding to ridicule religion in their companions or others, who might be disposed to attend to its duties; we also exhorted them to consider what would be the feeling respecting having given way to such ridicule, when reflecting upon it, on a death bed.

The pilot put us on shore on the north beach, upon the sand of which we walked a few miles, in company with the mate, and picked up some small Helmet-shells, and specimens of a large digitated sponge. Several Black-fish—a small species of whale—were driven upon this beach in the late


text:
Page:The Holy Bible, containing the Old & New Testament & the Apocrypha.djvu/989

VI] of the mulberry trees, that then thou shalt bestir thyself: for then shall the Lord go out before thee, to smite the host of the Philistines. And David did so, as the Lord had commanded him; and smote the Philistines from Geba until thou come to Gazer.

, David gathered together all the chosen men of Israel, thirty thousand. And David arose, and went with all the people that were with him from Baale of Judah, to bring up from thence the ark of God, whose name is called by the name of the Lord of hosts that dwelleth between the cherubims. And they set the ark of God upon a new cart, and brought it out of the house of Abinadab that was in Gibeah: and Uzzah and Ahio, the sons of Abinadab, drave the new cart. And they brought it out of the house of Abinadab which was at Gibeah, accompanying the ark of God: and Ahio went before the ark. And David and all the house of Israel played before the Lord on all manner of instruments made of fir wood, even on harps, and on psalteries, and on timbrels, and on cornets, and on cymbals.

And when they came to Nachon's threshingfloor, Uzzah put forth his hand to the ark of God, and took hold of it; for the oxen shook it. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah; and God smote him there for his error; and there he died by the ark


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/73

 is one of the cardinal facts in our human constitution. Polarizing and magnetizing us as they do, we turn towards them and from them, we seek them, hold them, hate them, bless them, just as if they were so many concrete beings. And beings they are, beings as real in the realm which they inhabit as the changing things of sense are in the realm of space.

Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common human feeling, that the doctrine of the reality of abstract objects has been known as the platonic theory of ideas ever since. Abstract Beauty, for example, is for Plato a perfectly definite individual being, of which the intellect is aware as of something additional to all the perishing beauties of the earth. "The true order of going," he says, in the often quoted passage in his 'Banquet,' "is to use the beauties of earth as steps along which one mounts upwards for the sake of that other Beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute Beauty, and at last knows what the essence of Beauty is." In our last lecture we had a glimpse of the way in which a platonizing writer like Emerson may treat the abstract divineness of things, the moral structure of the universe, as a fact worthy of worship. In those various churches without a God which to-day are spreading through the world under the name of ethical societies, we have a similar worship of the abstract divine, the moral law believed in as an ultimate object. 'Science' in many minds is genuinely taking the place of a religion. Where this is so, the scientist treats the 'Laws of Nature' as objective facts to be revered. A brilliant school of interpretation of Greek mythology


text:
Page:Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies.djvu/94

58 storm. A spaniel dog that accompanied us, rolled itself on the partially decomposed carcase of each of these as he came at it; I could not discover for what object.

Parties of Aborigines resort hither at certain seasons. They cross the mouth of the harbour on floats, in the form of a boat, made of bundles of the paper-like bark of the Swamp Tea-tree, lashed side by side, by means of tough grass. On these, three or four persons are placed, and one swims on each side, holding it with one hand. These Aborigines are said to be shy, but not to have committed any outrage. One of them exchanged a girl of about fourteen years of age, for a dog, with the people at the Pilot Station; but the girl not liking her situation was taken back, and the dog returned.

23rd. We went on shore close by the vessel, and on the way to the Pilot Station passed some large patches of a species of Blandfordia—a lily-like plant, with a crest of scarlet tubular flowers—which abounds also at Port Davey.

We afterwards traversed a portion of the beach, open to the sea on the south, near Cape Sorell. It consisted of numerous little bays; some sandy, others shingly, some rocky, and others covered thickly with decomposing kelp of enormous size, the smell of which was very disagreeable. Multitudes of maggots are produced in it, on which flocks of White Cockatoos feed, that roost among the large bushes on the shore. Ducks and other sea-fowl also find a plentiful supply of food in the maggots, which are floated off in abundance by the rising tide. The rotten kelp affords a manure to the peaty garden of the pilot, so congenial to the growth of potatoes, that those grown there exceed the best I ever saw in England.—There was a lichen on the neighbouring hills, of the same race as the Reindeer-moss, but of a texture resembling delicate net-work. In the abundant rain, it was distended into masses resembling cauliflowers. Like some of its congeners, it seemed as if it might be used for food: its taste was insipid, and I found no inconvenience from eating it.

We remained all night at the pilot's house, and in the morning had a meeting with the men, in which we were


text:
Page:The Holy Bible, containing the Old & New Testament & the Apocrypha.djvu/990

Rh of God. And David was displeased, because the Lord had made a breach upon Uzzah: and he called the name of the place Perez-uzzah to this day. And David was afraid of the Lord that day, and said, How shall the ark of the Lord come to me? So David would not remove the ark of the Lord unto him into the city of David: but David carried it aside into the house of Obed-edom the Gittite. And the ark of the Lord continued in the house of Obed-edom the Gittite three months: and the Lord blessed Obed-edom, and all his household.

And it was told king David, saying, The Lord hath blessed the house of Obed-edom, and all that pertaineth unto him, because of the ark of God. So David went and brought up the ark of God from the house of Obed-edom into the city of David with gladness. And it was so, that when they that bare the ark of the Lord had gone six paces, he sacrificed oxen and fatlings. And David danced before the Lord with all his might; and David was girded with a linen ephod. So David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting, and with the sound of the trumpet. And as the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michal Saul's daughter looked through a window, and saw king David leaping and dancing before the Lord; and she despised him in her heart.


text:
Page:The Holy Bible, containing the Old & New Testament & the Apocrypha.djvu/991

VI] And they brought in the ark of the Lord, and set it in his place, in the midst of the tabernacle that David had pitched for it: and David offered burnt offerings and peace offerings before the Lord. And as soon as David had made an end of offering burnt offerings and peace offerings, he blessed the people in the name of the Lord of hosts. And he dealt among all the people, even among the whole multitude of Israel, as well to the women as men, to every one a cake of bread, and a good piece of flesh, and a flagon of wine. So all the people departed every one to his house.

Then David returned to bless his household. And Michal the daughter of Saul came out to meet David, and said, How glorious was the king of Israel to day, who uncovered himself to day in the eyes of the handmaids of his servants, as one of the vain fellows shamelessly uncovereth himself! And David said unto Michal, It was before the Lord, which chose me before thy father, and before all his house, to appoint me ruler over the people of the Lord, over Israel: therefore will I play before the Lord. And I will yet be more vile than thus, and will be base in mine own sight: and of the maidservants which thou hast spoken of, of them shall I be had in honour. Therefore Michal the daughter of Saul had no child unto the day of her death.


text:
Page:Auerbach-Spinozanovel.djvu/349

Rh Good Gertrui was very uneasy about her new lodger.

"I don't know," she said, "whether you mean to accustom yourself to do without food, or whether the ravens from Heaven come to feed you, like the prophet in the wilderness; you cannot possibly have enough with what you have from me. Yesterday you had nothing all day long but milk soup, some butter and a little draught of beer which with the water and turf I bought comes to 4½ stivers, and to-day you have been satisfied the whole day with oat-meal porridge, raisins and butter, which have cost exactly the same. I calculated that in a whole month you have only at the most drunk two half pints of wine. That is neither living nor dying."

Spinoza tried to make the good dame understand that his earnings would not suffice for greater expense, and that he was quite satisfied with his manner of living.

"Yes," she said, "one ought only to stretch one's self according to one's counterpane, that is upright and honest; but if one can make the cover longer, is it not stupid to lie doubled under it like a shut-up clasp-knife? The many rich and great gentlemen who come in and out every day, I know well enough, would be well pleased to give you more money. It would not be like taking a present; they disturb you so often over your work that they ought

title: Page:Auerbach-Spinozanovel.djvu/349


text:
Page:Auerbach-Spinozanovel.djvu/350

328 to make it good again. The servant of rich Simon de Vries has now been here three times to invite you to his house, and instead of going there to eat fresh pulpy crabs, that melt in your mouth like butter, you stay at home to your thin milk-soup. Yet for the rest you know all about everything; one can come and talk to you about anything. I can't think what has come to you that you pinch yourself so."

The good dame would not be convinced by any arguments.

"Learned folk have always some queer notion or another in their heads," said she, as she descended the stairs and told Oldenburg, whom she met there, the whole dispute with variations. Oldenburg, too, was much displeased with his friend's voluntary imprisonment in a cell. He was afraid that such seclusion from active life, such silent burial in the depths of his thoughts and feelings, would create a boundary within which each disturbing element would engender a sensitiveness of feeling which would reject all opposition, because it had withdrawn from it. He knew not that such weaknesses of tender and reserved souls are far removed from great and steadfast minds, who know no partiality, for they bear the whole world in their hearts, and cannot be surprised or hurt at the discords of the outer world, because they have penetrated them, and to themselves have reduced all to

title: Page:Auerbach-Spinozanovel.djvu/350


text:
Page:Auerbach-Spinozanovel.djvu/351

Rh harmony. Other reasons also made the anxious friend think an alteration in Spinoza's way of life desirable. Among these stood first the fear that Spinoza's love for Olympia, which he had rightly guessed, might be so deeply rooted in his mind by solitude that it would become ineradicable. He still believed that, by prudent measures, he could enter into the life of an independent mind and direct it.

"Our age," he once said to Spinoza, "the age of humanity, new born from the classics and the self-revelations of reason, has its apostles, who travel through all lands and declare their new ideas like any others. When Christianity arose, and had not yet made itself accepted anywhere, pious men came forward and preached in all places, even at peril of their lives; and in our age we have seen enthusiastic men wander from town to town, and from land to land, making known the words revealed to them in all places. Think of Giordano Bruno; he has travelled through almost the whole civilized world to support his views on all sides. Unfortunately he made the incomprehensible mistake of going back to Italy to die at the stake as a martyr for philosophy. But this way of learning to know the world and its motives and connecting forces from personal inspection, and placing it before the intelligence in living words, not trying to found and rule it from a lonely garret, is the only right

title: Page:Auerbach-Spinozanovel.djvu/351


text:
Page:The Holy Bible, containing the Old & New Testament & the Apocrypha.djvu/992

Rh it came to pass, when the king sat in his house, and the Lord had given him rest round about from all his enemies; that the king said unto Nathan the prophet, See now, I dwell in an house of cedar, but the ark of God dwelleth within curtains. And Nathan said to the king, Go, do all that is in thine heart; for the Lord is with thee.

And it came to pass that night, that the word of the Lord came unto Nathan, saying, Go and tell my servant David, Thus saith the Lord, Shalt thou build me an house for me to dwell in? whereas I have not dwelt in any house since the time that I brought up the children of Israel out of Egypt, even to this day, but have walked in a tent and in a tabernacle. In all the places wherein I have walked with all the children of Israel spake I a word with any of the tribes of Israel, whom I commanded to feed my people Israel, saying, Why build ye not me an house of cedar? Now therefore so shalt thou say unto my servant David, Thus saith the Lord of hosts, I took thee from the sheepcote, from following the sheep, to be ruler over my people, over Israel: and I was with thee whithersoever thou wentest, and have cut off all thine enemies out of thy sight, and have made thee a great name, like unto the name of the great men that are in the earth. Moreover I will appoint a place for my


text:
Page:Auerbach-Spinozanovel.djvu/352

330 way for a true thinker. Our master, or, if you do not like to call him that, our teacher, Descartes, after a time of lonely seclusion, recognized that the truth must be extracted from the world if it would again pervade the world. He learned to know men in peace and war; he was even a soldier himself, and travelled much. And you must recognize this too as a revelation of our age, that it has been granted to our century first, in artistic recognition of silent nature, to open the mind's eye to landscape. You too must travel, and if you do not wish to teach the world you must at least learn to know it truly. You shall not want for money; de Vries and I will willingly give you all you need. You must not reject it, for it is not a present offered to a friend; we pay this tribute to science and mankind. You do more than we; you dedicate your life to it."

"If you please," answered Spinoza in a gentle voice, "if you do not intend to annoy me, let this be the last time that you make me offers of money. I explained to you and de Vries long ago that I could not accept it. Moreover, as far as I am concerned, I cannot endure this new sort of wandering philosophy which you so strongly recommend. I am no friend to disputation with this, that and the other man, and seldom see any advantage accrue from it; for what is opposed is usually not the expression of pure thoughts, but such personalities

title: Page:Auerbach-Spinozanovel.djvu/352


text:
Page:Auerbach-Spinozanovel.djvu/353

Rh and wilful misinterpretations that it has more to do with Peter and Paul, and what they have become by habit and inclination, than with pure intellect."

"Just why you should learn to know Peter and Paul more intimately, to conquer their prejudices, and personal bias."

"I wish to explore and ascertain the laws of human existence and intelligence. I have often explained to you already that I do not set myself to discover the errors of others. If these are revealed by the revelation of the natural law so much the better. You, by your profession, must concern yourself for others; to me it is given to search in the book of history and the workings of my own life."

"That you should do," answered Oldenburg, "and to do so you should investigate the world in the whole, as well as in detail. Let me take your handiwork, these glasses, as a metaphor. Were our eyes microscopically arranged, we should look at only a single part, never at a whole; were our eyes only for a distant prospect, we should never know the peculiarities of things. Thus it is the prerogative of human intellect to accommodate by art both the microscopic and telescopic views of things to its own assigned natural mediocrity; and in conclusion by imagination, by thought, to recognize them in their conditions; but this the large and small views must precede. It is thus with our

title: Page:Auerbach-Spinozanovel.djvu/353


text:
Page:The Holy Bible, containing the Old & New Testament & the Apocrypha.djvu/993

VII] people Israel, and will plant them, that they may dwell in a place of their own, and move no more; neither shall the children of wickedness afflict them any more, as beforetime, and as since the time that I commanded judges to be over my people Israel, and have caused thee to rest from all thine enemies. Also the Lord telleth thee that he will make thee an house.

And when thy days be fulfilled, and thou shalt sleep with thy fathers, I will set up thy seed after thee, which shall proceed out of thy bowels, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build an house for my name, and I will stablish [sic] the throne of his kingdom for ever. I will be his father, and he shall be my son. If he commit iniquity, I will chasten him with the rod of men, and with the stripes of the children of men: but my mercy shall not depart away from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away before thee. And thine house and thy kingdom shall be established for ever before thee: thy throne shall be established for ever. According to all these words, and according to all this vision, so did Nathan speak unto David.

Then went king David in, and sat before the Lord, and he said, Who am I, O Lord God? and what is my house, that thou hast brought me hitherto? And


text:
Page:Authors daughter v1.djvu/173

Rh He had nearly finished his letter when Jessie came up to him and said her father was going to read a sermon as usual on Sunday evening; would he take his letter away and finish it, or would he stay and listen with the rest of the household? George preferred to stay.

"You had better stop and hearken," said Mr. Lindsay. "It's no mony sermons you're like to hear up the Darling, and I hope this one will do you good. Pass me my spectacles, Amy, and find me out my place. I've read the book through so often, that I'm no clear about where I left off, but you may keep mind of it better."

George had always felt something wanting in the little religious service which marked the difference between Sabbath and ilkaday in the Scottish household of Hugh Lindsay, and this evening he felt it more than ever. In such country situations as this of Branxholm there seems a want of some simple and familiar liturgy to express the thanksgivings and the supplications of the household; but the Scottish system of extempore, or a least original and unwritten, prayer, allows of no set form of worship, where there is no minister to conduct it. There is certainly latitude given to private persons, but Hugh Lindsay had no gift in prayer, being a man rather slow of speech and indisposed to make any

title: Page:Authors daughter v1.djvu/173


text:
Author talk:Alice Effie Murray

Marriage
Murray  Alice Effie	  	 Wandsworth	 1d	1178 Radice	 Charles Albert	 	 Wandsworth	 1d	1178
 * GRO Marriages Dec 1903

Death
Name: Alice E Radice Date of Registration: 	Apr-May-Jun 1951 Age at Death: 73 Registration district: 	Aylesbury Volume: 6a Page: 294
 * England & Wales, Death Index: 1916-2006

RADICE.—On April 3, 1951 peacefully at Cophill, Long Crendon, Buks. , wife of, I.C.S., deeply mourned by all her children. Funeral service at Souldern Church. to-morrow (Thursday), at 12 noon. Station, Aynho Park.
 * The Times (London, England), Wednesday, Apr 04, 1951; pg. 1; Issue 51966. — Deaths.

title: Author talk:Alice Effie Murray


text:
Page:Authors daughter v1.djvu/174

170 profession of religion. Books of family prayer no doubt abound, fitted for families in full possession of all the ordinances and inhabiting Great Britain; but for persons living in the far bush, who never hear a church bell, the omissions that ought to be made and the passages that ought to be supplied, would have required a quicker eye and a more ready tongue than Mr. Lindsay's.

So he contented himself with seeing that no unnecessary work was done on Sundays, and with reading a sermon in a somewhat broad accent to his household in the evenings. He occasionally bought a new volume, but his favourite book was a collection of sermons which had been given to him by his brother on leaving, which had been written by a minister whom he had heard often preach on sacramental occasions; for he belonged to the same presbytery as Hugh Lindsay's own minister, and was considered the most able man of them all. Fifty-two sermons a year had been read for many a year in that household, and this particular book was so familiar to Jessie and Allan that they knew the turn of every sentence in it. The sermon to Scottish minds is the most important part of the religious service at church, so that it is natural that it should be offered as a

title: Page:Authors daughter v1.djvu/174


text:
Page:The Holy Bible, containing the Old & New Testament & the Apocrypha.djvu/994

Rh this was yet a small thing in thy sight, O Lord God; but thou hast spoken also of thy servant's house for a great while to come. And is this the manner of man, O Lord God? And what can David say more unto thee? for thou, Lord God, knowest thy servant. For thy word's sake, and according to thine own heart, hast thou done all these great things, to make thy servant know them. Wherefore thou art great, O Lord God: for there is none like thee, neither is there any God beside thee, according to all that we have heard with our ears. And what one nation in the earth is like thy people, even like Israel, whom God went to redeem for a people to himself, and to make him a name, and to do for you great things and terrible, for thy land, before thy people, which thou redeemedst to thee from Egypt, from the nations and their gods? For thou hast confirmed to thyself thy people Israel to be a people unto thee for ever: and thou, Lord, art become their God. And now, O Lord God the word that thou hast spoken concerning thy servant, and concerning his house, establish it for ever, and do as thou hast said. And let thy name be magnified for ever, saying, The Lord of hosts is the God over Israel: and let the house of thy servant David be established before thee. For thou, O Lord of hosts, God of Israel, hast revealed to thy servant, saying,


text:
Author:Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

Works

 * Voyage à l'Île de France, à l'île Bourbon et au cap de Bonne-Espérance (1773)
 * L'Arcadie (1781)
 * Études de la nature (1784)
 * Paul et Virginie (1788)
 * La Chaumière indienne (1790)
 * Le Café de Surate (1790) (PDF)
 * Les Vœux d'un solitaire (1790)
 * De la nature de la morale (1798)
 * Voyage en Silésie (1807)
 * La Mort de Socrate (1808)
 * Harmonies de la nature (1815)


text:
Page:The Holy Bible, containing the Old & New Testament & the Apocrypha.djvu/995

VIII] I will build thee an house: therefore hath thy servant found in his heart to pray this prayer unto thee. And now, O Lord God, thou art that God, and thy words be true, and thou hast promised this goodness unto thy servant: therefore now let it please thee to bless the house of thy servant, that it may continue for ever before thee: for thou, O Lord God, hast spoken it: and with thy blessing let the house of thy servant be blessed for ever.

after this it came to pass, that David smote the Philistines, and subdued them: and David took Metheg-ammah out of the hand of the Philistines. And he smote Moab, and measured them with a line, casting them down to the ground; even with two lines measured he to put to death, and with one full line to keep alive. And so the Moabites became David's servants, and brought gifts.

David smote also Hadadezer, the son of Rehob, king of Zobah, as he went to recover his border at the river Euphrates. And David took from him a thousand chariots, and seven hundred horsemen, and twenty thousand footmen: and David houghed all the chariot horses, but reserved of them for an hundred chariots. And when the Syrians of Damascus came to succour Hadadezer king of Zobah, David slew of the Syrians two and twenty thousand men. Then


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/74

 would have it that in their origin the Greek gods were only half-metaphoric personifications of those great spheres of abstract law and order into which the natural world falls apart—the sky-sphere, the ocean-sphere, the earth-sphere, and the like; just as even now we may speak of the smile of the morning, the kiss of the breeze, or the bite of the cold, without really meaning that these phenomena of nature actually wear a human face.

As regards the origin of the Greek gods, we need not at present seek an opinion. But the whole array of our instances leads to a conclusion something like this: It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call 'something there,' more deep and more general than any of the special and particular 'senses' by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed. If this were so, we might suppose the senses to waken our attitudes and conduct as they so habitually do, by first exciting this sense of reality; but anything else, any idea, for example, that might similarly excite it, would have that same prerogative of appearing real which objects of sense normally possess. So far as religious conceptions were able to touch this reality-feeling, they would be believed in in spite of criticism, even though they might be so vague and remote as to be almost unimaginable, even though they might be such non-entities in point of whatness, as Kant makes the objects of his moral theology to be.

The most curious proofs of the existence of such an undifferentiated sense of reality as this are found in experiences of hallucination. It often happens that an


text:
Page:The Holy Bible, containing the Old & New Testament & the Apocrypha.djvu/996

Rh put garrisons in Syria of Damascus: and the Syrians became servants to David, and brought gifts. And the Lord preserved David whithersoever he went. And David took the shields of gold that were on the servants of Hadadezer, and brought them to Jerusalem. And from Betah, and from Berothai, cities of Hadadezer, king David took exceeding much brass.

When Toi king of Hamath heard that David had smitten all the host of Hadadezer, then Toi sent Joram his son unto king David, to salute him, and to bless him, because he had fought against Hadadezer, and smitten him: for Hadadezer had wars with Toi. And Joram brought with him vessels of silver, and vessels of gold, and vessels of brass: which also king David did dedicate unto the Lord, with the silver and gold that he had dedicated of all nations which he subdued; of Syria, and of Moab, and of the children of Ammon, and of the Philistines, and of Amalek, and of the spoil of Hadadezer, son of Rehob, king of Zobah. And David gat him a name when he returned from smiting of the Syrians in the valley of salt, being eighteen thousand men.

And he put garrisons in Edom; throughout all Edom put he garrisons, and all they of Edom became David's servants. And the Lord preserved David whithersoever he went. And David reigned over


text: Historical Account of the Navigable Rivers, Canals, and Railways, of Great Britain/Adur River


text:
Page:Auerbach-Spinozanovel.djvu/354

332 knowledge of human life. So travel and live for yourself."

"Leave me to my homely four walls," answered the philosopher. "The world of appearances is well enough investigated and described by others for us to follow its laws by quiet observation. I am ever myself in my cell here, and strive to collect around me all the spirits of truth. Believe me, it is a numerous and goodly company, and I am never alone or desolate; and if I am alone with myself, I can investigate more quietly and uninterruptedly the mingled elements and connecting links of the human mind. He who from the height of a bird's flight can take in with his eye how one stream flows into another, and at last all flow into the sea, can see no more than is offered to the quiet glance when it follows the inner cross currents of the mind. Yes, he who can live quietly alone with his own mind—with a mind that is controlled or influenced by nothing foreign to itself—he lives again in Paradise, happy in himself and in the universe."

Oldenburg's eyes had never yet sparkled as they did now; there was a thrill of reverence and ecstasy perceptible in his usually firm voice and in his whole deportment as he rose and said:

"O friend! what can we say to you who have all things in yourself? And yet perhaps a call from without may yet be a motive to you. See, it is not for naught that the legends of all people say that

title: Page:Auerbach-Spinozanovel.djvu/354


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/75

 hallucination is imperfectly developed: the person affected will feel a 'presence' in the room, definitely localized, facing in one particular way, real in the most emphatic sense of the word, often coming suddenly, and as suddenly gone; and yet neither seen, heard, touched, nor cognized in any of the usual 'sensible' ways. Let me give you an example of this, before I pass to the objects with whose presence religion is more peculiarly concerned.

An intimate friend of mine, one of the keenest intellects I know, has had several experiences of this sort. He writes as follows in response to my inquiries:—

"I have several times within the past few years felt the so-called 'consciousness of a presence.' The experiences which I have in mind are clearly distinguishable from another kind of experience which I have had very frequently, and which I fancy many persons would also call the 'consciousness of a presence.' But the difference for me between the two sets of experience is as great as the difference between feeling a slight warmth originating I know not where, and standing in the midst of a conflagration with all the ordinary senses alert.

"It was about September, 1884, when I had the first experience. On the previous night I had had, after getting into bed at my rooms in College, a vivid tactile hallucination of being grasped by the arm, which made me get up and search the room for an intruder; but the sense of presence properly so called came on the next night. After I had got into bed and blown out the candle, I lay awake awhile thinking on the previous night's experience, when suddenly I felt something come into the room and stay close to my bed. It remained only a minute or two. I did not recognize it by any ordinary sense, and yet there was a horribly unpleasant 'sensation' connected with it. It stirred something more at the roots of my being than any ordinary perception. The feeling had something of the quality of a very large tearing vital pain spreading chiefly over the chest, but within the organism—and yet the feeling


text:
Page:The Holy Bible, containing the Old & New Testament & the Apocrypha.djvu/997

IX] all Israel; and David executed judgment and justice unto all his people. And Joab the son of Zeruiah was over the host; and Jehoshaphat the son of Ahilud was recorder; and Zadok the son of Ahitub, and Ahimelech the son of Abiathar, were the priests; and Seraiah was the scribe; and Benaiah the son of Jehoiada was over both the Cherethites and the Pelethites; and David's sons were chief rulers.

David said, Is there yet any that is left of the house of Saul, that I may shew him kindness for Jonathan's sake? And there was of the house of Saul a servant whose name was Ziba. And when they had called him unto David, the king said unto him, Art thou Ziba? And he said, Thy servant is he. And the king said, Is there not yet any of the house of Saul, that I may shew the kindness of God unto him? And Ziba said unto the king, Jonathan hath yet a son, which is lame on his feet. And the king said unto him, Where is he? And Ziba said unto the king, Behold, he is in the house of Machir, the son of Ammiel, in Lo-debar.

Then king David sent, and fetched him out of the house of Machir, the son of Ammiel, from Lo-debar. Now when Mephibosheth, the son of Jonathan, the son of Saul, was come unto David, he fell on his face, and did reverence. And David said, Mephibosheth.


text: Historical Account of the Navigable Rivers, Canals, and Railways, of Great Britain/Aire and Calder Navigation


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/76

 was not pain so much as abhorrence. At all events, something was present with me, and I knew its presence far more surely than I have ever known the presence of any fleshly living creature. I was conscious of its departure as of its coming: an almost instantaneously swift going through the door, and the 'horrible sensation' disappeared.

"On the third night when I retired my mind was absorbed in some lectures which I was preparing, and I was still absorbed in these when I became aware of the actual presence (though not of the coming) of the thing that was there the night before, and of the 'horrible sensation.' I then mentally concentrated all my effort to charge this 'thing,' if it was evil, to depart, if it was not evil, to tell me who or what it was, and if it could not explain itself, to go, and that I would compel it to go. It went as on the previous night, and my body quickly recovered its normal state.

"On two other occasions in my life I have had precisely the same 'horrible sensation.' Once it lasted a full quarter of an hour. In all three instances the certainty that there in outward space there stood something was indescribably stronger than the ordinary certainty of companionship when we are in the close presence of ordinary living people. The something seemed close to me, and intensely more real than any ordinary perception. Although I felt it to be like unto myself, so to speak, or finite, small, and distressful, as it were, I didn't recognize it as any individual being or person."

Of course such an experience as this does not connect itself with the religious sphere. Yet it may upon occasion do so; and the same correspondent informs me that at more than one other conjuncture he had the sense of presence developed with equal intensity and abruptness, only then it was filled with a quality of joy.

"There was not a mere consciousness of something there, but fused in the central happiness of it, a startling awareness of some ineffable good. Not vague either, not like the emotional effect of some poem, or scene, or blossom, of music, but the sure knowledge of the close presence of a sort of mighty person, and


text:
Page:The Holy Bible, containing the Old & New Testament & the Apocrypha.djvu/998

Rh And he answered, Behold thy servant! And David said unto him, Fear not: for I will surely shew thee kindness for Jonathan thy father's sake, and will restore thee all the land of Saul thy father; and thou shalt eat bread at my table continually. And he bowed himself, and said, What is thy servant, that thou shouldest look upon such a dead dog as I am?

Then the king called to Ziba, Saul's servant, and said unto him, I have given unto thy master's son all that pertained to Saul and to all his house. Thou therefore, and thy sons, and thy servants, shall till the land for him, and thou shalt bring in the fruits, that thy master's son may have food to eat: but Mephibosheth thy master's son shall eat bread alway [sic] at my table. Now Ziba had fifteen sons and twenty servants. Then said Ziba unto the king, According to all that my lord the king hath commanded his servant, so shall thy servant do. As for Mephibosheth, said the king, he shall eat at my table, as one of the king's sons. And Mephibosheth had a young son, whose name was Micha. And all that dwelt in the house of Ziba were servants unto Mephibosheth. So Mephibosheth dwelt in Jerusalem: for he did eat continually at the king's table; and was lame on both his feet.

it came to pass after this, that the king of the


text:
Page:The Holy Bible, containing the Old & New Testament & the Apocrypha.djvu/999

X] children of Ammon died, and Hanun his son reigned in his stead. Then said David, I will shew kindness unto Hanun the son of Nahash, as his father shewed kindness unto me. And David sent to comfort him by the hand of his servants for his father. And David's servants came into the land of the children of Ammon. And the princes of the children of Ammon said unto Hanun their lord, Thinkest thou that David doth honour thy father, that he hath sent comforters unto thee? hath not David rather sent his servants unto thee, to search the city, and to spy it out, and to overthrow it? Wherefore Hanun took David's servants, and shaved off the one half of their beards, and cut off their garments in the middle, even to their buttocks, and sent them away. When they told it unto David, he sent to meet them, because the men were greatly ashamed: and the king said, Tarry at Jericho until your beards be grown, and then return.

And when the children of Ammon saw that they stank before David, the children of Ammon sent and hired the Syrians of Beth-rehob, and the Syrians of Zoba, twenty thousand footmen, and of king Maacah a thousand men, and of Ish-tob twelve thousand men. And when David heard of it, he sent Joab, and all the host of the mighty men. And the children of


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/77

 after it went, the memory persisted as the one perception of reality. Everything else might be a dream, but not that."

My friend, as it oddly happens, does not interpret these latter experiences theistically, as signifying the presence of God. But it would clearly not have been unnatural to interpret them as a revelation of the deity's existence. When we reach the subject of mysticism, we shall have much more to say upon this head.

Lest the oddity of these phenomena should disconcert you, I will venture to read you a couple of similar narratives, much shorter, merely to show that we are dealing with a well-marked natural kind of fact. In the first case, which I take from the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, the sense of presence developed in a few moments into a distinctly visualized hallucination,—but I leave that part of the story out.


text:
Page:The Holy Bible, containing the Old & New Testament & the Apocrypha.djvu/1000

Rh Ammon came out, and put the battle in array at the entering in of the gate: and the Syrians of Zoba, and of Rehob, and Ish-tob, and Maacah, were by themselves in the field. When Joab saw that the front of the battle was against him before and behind, he chose of all the choice men of Israel, and put them in array against the Syrians: and the rest of the people he delivered into the hand of Abishai his brother, that he might put them in array against the children of Ammon. And he said, If the Syrians be too strong for me, then thou shalt help me: but if the children of Ammon be too strong for thee, then I will come and help thee. Be of good courage, and let us play the men for our people, and for the cities of our God: and the Lord do that which seemeth him good. And Joab drew nigh, and the people that were with him, unto the battle against the Syrians: and they fled before him. And when the children of Ammon saw that the Syrians were fled, then fled they also before Abishai, and entered into the city. So Joab returned from the children of Ammon, and came to Jerusalem.

And when the Syrians saw that they were smitten before Israel, they gathered themselves together. And Hadarezer sent, and brought out the Syrians that were beyond the river: and they came to


text:
User talk:John Carter

Dictionary of Mormonism
Rather than listing every entry in Category:Mormonism alphabetized as beginning with "A", it might be wise to sort them alphabetically by the entry headword (title) instead. --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:59, 25 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Actually, I'm not listing them all in that category, but you're right. John Carter (talk) 22:23, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

Share your experience and feedback as a Wikimedian in this global survey
Hello! The Wikimedia Foundation is asking for your feedback in a survey. We want to know how well we are supporting your work on and off wiki, and how we can change or improve things in the future. The opinions you share will directly affect the current and future work of the Wikimedia Foundation. You have been randomly selected to take this survey as we would like to hear from your Wikimedia community. The survey is available in various languages and will take between 20 and 40 minutes. Take the survey now!

You can find more information about this survey on the project page and see how your feedback helps the Wikimedia Foundation support editors like you. This survey is hosted by a third-party service and governed by this privacy statement (in English). Please visit our frequently asked questions page to find more information about this survey. If you need additional help, or if you wish to opt-out of future communications about this survey, send an email through the EmailUser feature to WMF Surveys to remove you from the list.

Thank you! WMF Surveys, 18:36, 29 March 2018 (UTC)

Reminder: Share your feedback in this Wikimedia survey
Every response for this survey can help the Wikimedia Foundation improve your experience on the Wikimedia projects. So far, we have heard from just 29% of Wikimedia contributors. The survey is available in various languages and will take between 20 and 40 minutes to be completed. Take the survey now.

If you have already taken the survey, we are sorry you've received this reminder. We have design the survey to make it impossible to identify which users have taken the survey, so we have to send reminders to everyone. If you wish to opt-out of the next reminder or any other survey, send an email through EmailUser feature to WMF Surveys. You can also send any questions you have to this user email. Learn more about this survey on the project page. This survey is hosted by a third-party service and governed by this Wikimedia Foundation privacy statement. Thanks! WMF Surveys, 01:34, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

Your feedback matters: Final reminder to take the global Wikimedia survey
Hello! This is a final reminder that the Wikimedia Foundation survey will close on 23 April, 2018 (07:00 UTC). The survey is available in various languages and will take between 20 and 40 minutes. Take the survey now.

'''If you already took the survey - thank you! We will not bother you again.''' We have designed the survey to make it impossible to identify which users have taken the survey, so we have to send reminders to everyone. To opt-out of future surveys, send an email through EmailUser feature to WMF Surveys. You can also send any questions you have to this user email. Learn more about this survey on the project page. This survey is hosted by a third-party service and governed by this Wikimedia Foundation privacy statement. WMF Surveys, 00:43, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Wikisource:News (en): April 2019 edition
 English Wikisource's monthly newsletter; Wikisource:News, which seeks to inform all about Wikimedia's multilingual Wikisource.
 * From the Editors: Volume 3 confirmed
 * Xover nominated to be admin
 * Administrator confirmations for April 2019
 * Wikisource — A Wikipedia project
 * WikiProject Spotlight: WikiProject Validate

Read this issue of Wikisource:News · Discussion · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 23:43, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

Noting that thus is one-off delivery to those listed at Wikisource Community User Group participants, and those wishing to receive further editions of the newsletter should subscribe as described in the above instructions.

title: User talk:John Carter


text:
Author:Edmund Gurney

Works

 * The power of sound, 1880 external scan
 * Phantasms of the Living (1886) vol 1, vol 2
 * Tertium quid, 1887 vol 1, vol 2

title: Author:Edmund Gurney


text:
Author:Théodore Flournoy

Works

 * From India to the planet Mars (1899)
 * Spiritism and psychology (1911)
 * The Philosophy of William James (1911)

title: Author:Théodore Flournoy


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/78

 Another informant writes:—

Professor Flournoy of Geneva gives me the following testimony of a friend of his, a lady, who has the gift of automatic or involuntary writing:—

In an earlier book of mine I have cited at full length a curious case of presence felt by a blind man. The presence was that of the figure of a gray-bearded man dressed in a pepper and salt suit, squeezing himself under the crack of the door and moving across the floor of the room towards a sofa. The blind subject of this quasi-hallucination is an exceptionally intelligent reporter. He is entirely without internal visual imagery and cannot represent light or colors to himself, and is positive that


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/94

 LECTURES IV AND V

F we were to ask the question: 'What is human life's chief concern?' one of the answers we should receive would be: 'It is happiness.' How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure. The hedonistic school in ethics deduces the moral life wholly from the experiences of happiness and unhappiness which different kinds of conduct bring; and, even more in the religious life than in the moral life, happiness and unhappiness seem to be the poles round which the interest revolves. We need not go so far as to say with the author whom I lately quoted that any persistent enthusiasm is, as such, religion, nor need we call mere laughter a religious exercise; but we must admit that any persistent enjoyment may produce the sort of religion which consists in a grateful admiration of the gift of so happy an existence; and we must also acknowledge that the more complex ways of experiencing religion are new manners of producing happiness, wonderful inner paths to a supernatural kind of happiness, when the first gift of natural existence is unhappy, as it so often proves itself to be.

With such relations between religion and happiness, it is perhaps not surprising that men come to regard the happiness which a religious belief affords as a proof of its truth. If a creed makes a man feel happy, he almost inevitably adopts it. Such a belief ought to be true;


text:
Author:Louise-Victorine Ackermann

Works

 * Contes (1855)
 * Contes et Poesies (1863)
 * Pensées d'un solitaire (1883)

title: Author:Louise-Victorine Ackermann


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/79

 his other senses, hearing, etc., were not involved in this false perception. It seems to have been an abstract conception rather, with the feelings of reality and spatial outwardness directly attached to it—in other words, a fully objectified and exteriorized idea.

Such cases, taken along with others which would be too tedious for quotation, seem sufficiently to prove the existence in our mental machinery of a sense of present reality more diffused and general than that which our special senses yield. For the pyschologistspsychologists [sic] the tracing of the organic seat of such a feeling would form a pretty problem—nothing could be more natural than to connect it with the muscular sense, with the feeling that our muscles were innervating themselves for action. Whatsoever thus innervated our activity, or 'made our flesh creep,'—our senses are what do so oftenest,—might then appear real and present, even though it were but an abstract idea. But with such vague conjectures we have no concern at present, for our interest lies with the faculty rather than with its organic seat.

Like all positive affections of consciousness, the sense of reality has its negative counterpart in the shape of a feeling of unreality by which persons may be haunted, and of which one sometimes hears complaint:—


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/99

Rh to say about the young men and maidens who were facing the 'problem of life.' I had no idea whatever what the problem of life was. To live with all my might seemed to me easy; to learn where there was so much to learn seemed pleasant and almost of course; to lend a hand, if one had a chance, natural; and if one did this, why, he enjoyed life because he could not help it, and without proving to himself that he ought to enjoy it. … A child who is early taught that he is God's child, that he may live and move and have his being in God, and that he has, therefore, infinite strength at hand for the conquering of any difficulty, will take life more easily, and probably will make more of it, than one who is told that he is born the child of wrath and wholly incapable of good."

One can but recognize in such writers as these the presence of a temperament organically weighted on the side of cheer and fatally forbidden to linger, as those of opposite temperament linger, over the darker aspects of the universe. In some individuals optimism may become quasi-pathological. The capacity for even a transient sadness or a momentary humility seems cut off from them as by a kind of congenital anæsthesia.


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/80

 In another lecture we shall see how in morbid melancholy this sense of the unreality of things may become a carking pain, and even lead to suicide.

We may now lay it down as certain that in the distinctively religious sphere of experience, many persons (how many we cannot tell) possess the objects of their belief, not in the form of mere conceptions which their intellect accepts as true, but rather in the form of quasi-sensible realities directly apprehended. As his sense of the real presence of these objects fluctuates, so the believer alternates between warmth and coldness in his faith. Other examples will bring this home to one better than abstract description, so I proceed immediately to cite some. The first example is a negative one, deploring the loss of the sense in question. I have extracted it from an account given me by a scientific man of my acquaintance, of his religious life. It seems to me to show clearly that the feeling of reality may be something more like a sensation than an intellectual operation properly so-called.

"Between twenty and thirty I gradually became more and more agnostic and irreligious, yet I cannot say that I ever lost that 'indefinite consciousness' which Herbert Spencer describes so well, of an Absolute Reality behind phenomena. For me this Reality was not the pure Unknowable of Spencer's philosophy, for although I had ceased my childish prayers to God, and never prayed to It in a formal manner, yet my more recent experience shows me to have been in a relation to It which practically was the same thing as prayer. Whenever I had any trouble, especially when I had conflict with other people, either domestically or in the way of business, or when I was depressed in spirits or anxious about affairs, I now recognize that I used to fall back for support upon this curious relation I felt myself to be in to this fundamental cosmical It. It was on my side, or I was on Its side, however you please to term it, in the


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/81

 trouble, and it always strengthened me and seemed to give me endless vitality to feel its underlying and supporting presence. In fact, it was an unfailing fountain of living justice, truth, and strength, to which I instinctively turned at times of weakness, and it always brought me out. I know now that it was a personal relation I was in to it, because of late years the power of communicating with it has left me, and I am conscious of a perfectly definite loss. I used never to fail to find it when I turned to it. Then came a set of years when sometimes I found it, and then again I would be wholly unable to make connection with it. I remember many occasions on which at night in bed, I would be unable to get to sleep on account of worry. I turned this way and that in the darkness, and groped mentally for the familiar sense of that higher mind of my mind which had always seemed to be close at hand as it were, closing the passage, and yielding support, but there was no electric current. A blank was there instead of It: I couldn't find anything. Now, at the age of nearly fifty, my power of getting into connection with it has entirely left me; and I have to confess that a great help has gone out of my life. Life has become curiously dead and indifferent; and I can now see that my old experience was probably exactly the same thing as the prayers of the orthodox, only I did not call them by that name. What I have spoken of as 'It' was practically not Spencer's Unknowable, but just my own instinctive and individual God, whom I relied upon for higher sympathy, but whom somehow I have lost."

Nothing is more common in the pages of religious biography than the way in which seasons of lively and of difficult faith are described as alternating. Probably every religious person has the recollection of particular crises in which a directer vision of the truth, a direct perception, perhaps, of a living God's existence, swept in and overwhelmed the languor of the more ordinary belief. In James Russell Lowell's correspondence there is a brief memorandum of an experience of this kind:—


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/100

84 The supreme contemporary example of such an inability to feel evil is of course Walt Whitman.

"His favorite occupation," writes his disciple, Dr. Bucke, "seemed to be strolling or sauntering about outdoors by himself, looking at the grass, the trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the varying aspects of the sky, and listening to the birds, the crickets, the tree frogs, and all the hundreds of natural sounds. It was evident that these things gave him a pleasure far beyond what they give to ordinary people. Until I knew the man," continues Dr. Bucke, "it had not occurred to me that any one could derive so much absolute happiness from these things as he did. He was very fond of flowers, either wild or cultivated; liked all sorts. I think he admired lilacs and sunflowers just as much as roses. Perhaps, indeed, no man who ever lived liked so many things and disliked so few as Walt Whitman. All natural objects seemed to have a charm for him. All sights and sounds seemed to please him. He appeared to like (and I believe he did like) all the men, women, and children he saw (though I never knew him to say that he liked any one), but each who knew him felt that he liked him or her, and that he liked others also. I never knew him to argue or dispute, and he never spoke about money. He always justified, sometimes playfully, sometimes quite seriously, those who spoke harshly of himself or his writings, and I often thought he even took pleasure in the opposition of enemies. When I first knew [him], I used to think that he watched himself, and would not allow his tongue to give expression to fretfulness, antipathy, complaint, and remonstrance. It did not occur to me as possible that these mental states could be absent in him. After long observation, however, I satisfied myself that such absence or unconsciousness was entirely real. He never spoke deprecatingly of any nationality or class of men, or time in the world's history, or against any trades or occupations—not even against any animals, insects, or inanimate things, nor any of the


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/82

Here is a longer and more developed experience from a manuscript communication by a clergyman,—I take it from Starbuck's manuscript collection:—

"I remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hill-top, where my soul opened out, as it were, into the Infinite, and there was a rushing together of the two worlds, the inner and the outer. It was deep calling unto deep,—the deep that my own struggle had opened up within being answered by the unfathomable deep without, reaching beyond the stars. I stood alone with Him who had made me, and all the beauty of the world, and love, and sorrow, and even temptation. I did not seek Him, but felt the perfect unison of my spirit with His. The ordinary sense of things around me faded. For the moment nothing but an ineffable joy and exaltation remained. It is impossible fully to describe the experience. It was like the effect of some great orchestra when all the separate notes have melted into one swelling harmony that leaves the listener conscious of nothing save that his soul is being wafted upwards, and almost bursting with its own emotion. The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that He was


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/83

 there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two.

"My highest faith in God and truest idea of him were then born in me. I have stood upon the Mount of Vision since, and felt the Eternal round about me. But never since has there come quite the same stirring of the heart. Then, if ever, I believe, I stood face to face with God, and was born anew of his spirit. There was, as I recall it, no sudden change of thought or of belief, except that my early crude conception had, as it were, burst into flower. There was no destruction of the old, but a rapid, wonderful unfolding. Since that time no discussion that I have heard of the proofs of God's existence has been able to shake my faith. Having once felt the presence of God's spirit, I have never lost it again for long. My most assuring evidence of his existence is deeply rooted in that hour of vision, in the memory of that supreme experience, and in the conviction, gained from reading and reflection, that something the same has come to all who have found God. I am aware that it may justly be called mystical. I am not enough acquainted with philosophy to defend it from that or any other charge. I feel that in writing of it I have overlaid it with words rather than put it clearly to your thought. But, such as it is, I have described it as carefully as I now am able to do."

Here is another document, even more definite in character, which, the writer being a Swiss, I translate from the French original.

"I was in perfect health: we were on our sixth day of tramping, and in good training. We had come the day before from Sixt to Trient by Buet. I felt neither fatigue, hunger, nor thirst, and my state of mind was equally healthy. I had had at Forlaz good news from home; I was subject to no anxiety, either near or remote, for we had a good guide, and there was not a shadow of uncertainty about the road we should follow. I can best describe the condition in which I was by calling it a


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/375

 magic gift to mankind. The best missionary lives abound in the victorious combination of non-resistance with personal authority. John G. Paton, for example, in the New Hebrides, among brutish Melanesian cannibals, preserves a charmed life by dint of it. When it comes to the point, no one ever dares actually to strike him. Native converts, inspired by him, showed analogous virtue. "One of our chiefs, full of the Christ-kindled desire to seek and to save, sent a message to an inland chief, that he and four attendants would come on Sabbath and tell them the gospel of Jehovah God. The reply came back sternly forbidding their visit, and threatening with death any Christian that approached their village. Our chief sent in response a loving message, telling them that Jehovah had taught the Christians to return good for evil, and that they would come unarmed to tell them the story of how the Son of God came into the world and died in order to bless and save his enemies. The heathen chief sent back a stern and prompt reply once more: 'If you come, you will be killed.' On Sabbath morn the Christian chief and his four companions were met outside the village by the heathen chief, who implored and threatened them once more. But the former said:—

"'We come to you without weapons of war! We come only to tell you about Jesus. We believe that He will protect us to-day.'

"As they pressed steadily forward towards the village, spears began to be thrown at them. Some they evaded, being all except one dexterous warriors; and others they literally received with their bare hands, and turned them aside in an incredible manner. The heathen, apparently thunderstruck at these men thus approaching them without weapons of war, and not even flinging back their own spears which they had caught, after having thrown what the old chief called 'a shower of spears,' desisted from mere surprise. Our Christian chief called out, as he and his companions drew up in the midst of them on the village public ground:—

"'Jehovah thus protects us. He has given us all your spears! Once we would have thrown them back at you and killed you. But now we come, not to fight but to tell you about Jesus. He has changed our dark hearts. He asks you now to lay down all these your other weapons of war, and to hear what we can tell you about the love of God, our great Father, the only living God.'

"The heathen were perfectly overawed. They manifestly looked on these Christians as protected by some Invisible One. They listened for the first time to the story of the Gospel and of the Cross. We lived to see that chief and all his tribe sitting in the school of Christ. And there is perhaps not an island in these southern seas, amongst all those won for Christ, where similar acts of heroism on the part of converts cannot be recited." , Missionary to the New Hebrides, An Autobiography, second part, London, 1890, p. 243. Not only does his vision of a better world console us for the generally prevailing prose


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/376

 and barrenness; but even when on the whole we have to confess him ill adapted, he makes some converts, and the environment gets better for his ministry. He is an effective ferment of goodness, a slow transmuter of the earthly into a more heavenly order.

In this respect the Utopian dreams of social justice in which many contemporary socialists and anarchists indulge are, in spite of their impracticability and non-adaptation to present environmental conditions, analogous to the saint's belief in an existent kingdom of heaven. They help to break the edge of the general reign of hardness, and are slow leavens of a better order.

The next topic in order is Asceticism, which I fancy you are all ready to consider without argument a virtue liable to extravagance and excess. The optimism and refinement of the modern imagination has, as I have already said elsewhere, changed the attitude of the church towards corporeal mortification, and a Suso or a Saint Peter of Alcantara appear to us to-day rather in the


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/112

 innumerable failures and self-deceptions that are mixed in with them (for in everything human failure is a matter of course), and we can also overlook the verbiage of a good deal of the mind-cure literature, some of which is so moonstruck with optimism and so vaguely expressed that an academically trained intellect finds it almost impossible to read it at all.

The plain fact remains that the spread of the movement has been due to practical fruits, and the extremely practical turn of character of the American people has never been better shown than by the fact that this, their only decidedly original contribution to the systematic philosophy of life, should be so intimately knit up with concrete therapeutics. To the importance of mind-cure the medical and clerical professions in the United States are beginning, though with much recalcitrancy and protesting, to open their eyes. It is evidently bound to develop still farther, both speculatively and practically, and its latest writers are far and away the ablest of the group. It matters nothing that, just as there are hosts of persons who cannot pray, so there are greater hosts who cannot by any possibility be influenced by the mindcurers' ideas. For our immediate purpose, the important point is that so large a number should exist who can be so influenced. They form a psychic type to be studied with respect.


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/113

 To come now to a little closer quarters with their creed. The fundamental pillar on which it rests is nothing more than the general basis of all religious experience, the fact that man has a dual nature, and is connected with two spheres of thought, a shallower and a profounder sphere, in either of which he may learn to live more habitually. The shallower and lower sphere is that of the fleshly sensations, instincts, and desires, of egotism, doubt, and the lower personal interests. But whereas Christian theology has always considered speculation as to the way in which the suggestive ideas may work (p. 67 of the reprint). As regards the general phenomenon of mental cure itself, Dr. Goddard writes: "In spite of the severe criticism we have made of reports of cure, there still remains a vast amount of material, showing a powerful influence of the mind in disease. Many cases are of diseases that have been diagnosed and treated by the best physicians of the country, or which prominent hospitals have tried their hand at curing, but without success. People of culture and education have been treated by this method with satisfactory results. Diseases of long standing have been ameliorated, and even cured. … We have traced the mental element through primitive medicine and folk-medicine of to-day, patent medicine, and witchcraft. We are convinced that it is impossible to account for the existence of these practices, if they did not cure disease, and that if they cured disease, it must have been the mental element that was effective. The same argument applies to those modern schools of mental therapeutics—Divine Healing and Christian Science. It is hardly conceivable that the large body of intelligent people who comprise the body known distinctively as Mental Scientists should continue to exist if the whole thing were a delusion. It is not a thing of a day; it is not confined to a few; it is not local. It is true that many failures are recorded, but that only adds to the argument. There must be many and striking successes to counterbalance the failures, otherwise the failures would have ended the delusion. … Christian Science, Divine Healing, or Mental Science do not, and never can in the very nature of things, cure all diseases; nevertheless, the practical applications of the general principles of the broadest mental science will tend to prevent disease. … We do find sufficient evidence to convince us that the proper reform in mental attitude would relieve many a sufferer of ills that the ordinary physician cannot touch; would even delay the approach of death to many a victim beyond the power of absolute cure, and the faithful adherence to a truer philosophy of life will keep many a man well, and give the doctor time to devote to alleviating ills that are unpreventable." (pp. 33, 34 of reprint).


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/114

 to be the essential vice of this part of human nature, the mind-curers say that the mark of the beast in it is fear; and this is what gives such an entirely new religious turn to their persuasion.

The 'misery-habit,' the 'martyr-habit,' engendered by the prevalent 'fearthought,' get pungent criticism from the mind-cure writers:—

"Consider for a moment the habits of life into which we are born. There are certain social conventions or customs and alleged requirements, there is a theological bias, a general view of the world. There are conservative ideas in regard to our early training, our education, marriage, and occupation in life. Following close upon this, there is a long series of anticipations, namely, that we shall suffer certain children's diseases, diseases of middle life, and of old age; the thought that we shall grow


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/128

112 When we take up the phenomena of revivalistic conversion, we shall learn something more about all this. Meanwhile I will say a brief word about the mind-curer's methods.

They are of course largely suggestive. The suggestive influence of environment plays an enormous part in all spiritual education. But the word 'suggestion,' having acquired official status, is unfortunately already beginning to play in many quarters the part of a wet blanket upon investigation, being used to fend off all inquiry into the varying susceptibilities of individual cases. 'Suggestion' is only another name for the power of ideas, so far as they prove efficacious over belief and conduct. Ideas efficacious over some people prove inefficacious over others. Ideas efficacious at some times and in some human surroundings are not so at other times and elsewhere. The ideas of Christian churches are not efficacious in the therapeutic direction to-day, whatever they may have been in earlier centuries; and when the whole question is as to why the salt has lost its savor here or gained it there, the mere blank waving of the word 'suggestion' as if it were a banner gives no light. Dr. Goddard, whose candid psychological essay on Faith Cures ascribes them to nothing but ordinary suggestion, concludes by saying that "Religion [and by this he seems to mean our popular Christianity] has in it all there is in mental therapeutics, and has it in its best form. Living up to [our religious] ideas will do anything for us that can be done." And this in spite of the actual fact that the popular Christianity does


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/127

Rh A story which revivalist preachers often tell is that of a man who found himself at night slipping down the side of a precipice. At last he caught a branch which stopped his fall, and remained clinging to it in misery for hours. But finally his fingers had to loose their hold, and with a despairing farewell to life, he let himself drop. He fell just six inches. If he had given up the struggle earlier, his agony would have been spared. As the mother earth received him, so, the preachers tell us, will the everlasting arms receive us if we confide absolutely in them, and give up the hereditary habit of relying on our personal strength, with its precautions that cannot shelter and safeguards that never save.

The mind-curers have given the widest scope to this sort of experience. They have demonstrated that a form of regeneration by relaxing, by letting go, psychologically indistinguishable from the Lutheran justification by faith and the Wesleyan acceptance of free grace, is within the reach of persons who have no conviction of sin and care nothing for the Lutheran theology. It is but giving your little private convulsive self a rest, and finding that a greater Self is there. The results, slow or sudden, or great or small, of the combined optimism and expectancy, the regenerative phenomena which ensue on the abandonment of effort, remain firm facts of human nature, no matter whether we adopt a theistic, a pantheistic-idealistic, or a medical-materialistic view of their ultimate causal explanation.


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/193

Rh towards my childhood, my family, my country, all that was dear and sacred to me: the inflexible current of my thought was too strong,—parents, family, memory, beliefs, it forced me to let go of everything. The investigation went on more obstinate and more severe as it drew near its term, and did not stop until the end was reached. I knew then that in the depth of my mind nothing was left that stood erect.

"This moment was a frightful one; and when towards morning I threw myself exhausted on my bed, I seemed to feel my earlier life, so smiling and so full, go out like a fire, and before me another life opened, sombre and unpeopled, where in future I must live alone, alone with my fatal thought which had exiled me thither, and which I was tempted to curse. The days which followed this discovery were the saddest of my life." : Nouveaux Mélanges philosophiques, 2me édition, p. 83. I add two other cases of counter-conversion dating from a certain moment. The first is from Professor Starbuck's manuscript collection, and the narrator is a woman.

"Away down in the bottom of my heart, I believe I was always more or less skeptical about 'God;' skepticism grew as an undercurrent, all through my early youth, but it was controlled and covered by the emotional elements in my religious growth. When I was sixteen I joined the church and was asked if I loved God. I replied 'Yes,' as was customary and expected. But instantly with a flash something spoke within me, 'No, you do not.' I was haunted for a long time with shame and remorse for my falsehood and for my wickedness in not loving God, mingled with fear that there might be an avenging God who would punish me in some terrible way. … At nineteen, I had an attack of tonsilitis. Before I had quite recovered, I heard told a story of a brute who had kicked his wife downstairs, and then continued the operation until she became insensible. I felt the horror of the thing keenly. Instantly this thought flashed through my mind: 'I have no use for a God who permits such things.' This experience was followed by months of stoical indifference to the God of my previous life, mingled with feelings of positive dislike and a somewhat proud defiance of him. I still thought there might be a God. If so he would probably damn me, but I should have to stand it. I felt very little fear and no desire to propitiate him. I have never had any personal relations with him since this painful experience."

The second case exemplifies how small an additional stimulus will overthrow the mind into a new state of equilibrium when the process of preparation and incubation has proceeded far enough. It is like the proverbial last straw added to the camel's burden, or that touch of a needle which


text:
Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/194

178 In John Foster's Essay on Decision of Character, there is an account of a case of sudden conversion to avarice, which is illustrative enough to quote:—

A young man, it appears, "wasted, in two or three years, a large patrimony in profligate revels with a number of worthless associates who called themselves his friends, and who, when his last means were exhausted, treated him of course with neglect or contempt. Reduced to absolute want, he one day went out of the house with an intention to put an end to his life; but wandering awhile almost unconsciously, he came to the brow of an eminence which overlooked what were lately his estates. Here he sat down, and remained fixed in thought a number of hours, at the end of which he sprang from the ground with a vehement, exulting emotion. He had formed his resolution, which was, that all these estates should be his again; he had formed his plan, too, which he instantly began to execute. He walked hastily forward, determined to seize the first opportunity, of however humble a kind, to gain any money, though it were ever so despicable a trifle, and resolved absolutely not to