The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceEvangelicals. Don’t reason about it, as Dante says, but give a glanceand pass beyond! It is Avidhya, ignorance! something merely to beoutgrown and left be hind, transcended and forgotten. ChristianScience so-called, the sect of Mrs. Eddy, is the most radical branchof mind-cure in its dealings with evil. For it evil is simply a lie, andany one who mentions it is a liar. The optimistic ideal of duty forbidsus to pay it the compliment even of explicit attention. Of course,as our next lectures will show us, this is a bad speculative omission,but it is intimately linked with the practical merits of the system weare examining. Why regret a philosophy of evil, a mind-curer wouldask us, if I can put you in possession of a life of good?After all, it is the life that tells; and mind-cure has developed a livingsystem of mental hygiene which may well claim to have thrownall previous literature of the Diatetit der Seele into the shade. Thissystem is wholly and exclusively compacted of optimism: “Pessimismleads to weakness. Optimism leads to power.” “Thoughts are things,”as one of the most vigorous mind-cure writers prints in bold type atthe bottom of each of his pages; and if your thoughts are of health,youth, vigor, and success, before you know it these things will also beyour outward portion. No one can fail of the regenerative influenceof optimistic thinking, pertinaciously pursued. Every man owns indefeasiblythis inlet to the divine. Fear, on the contrary, and all thecontracted and egoistic modes of thought, are inlets to destruction.Most mind-curers here bring in a doctrine that thoughts are “forces,”and that, by virtue of a law that like attracts like, one man’s thoughtsdraw to themselves as allies all the thoughts of the same character thatexist the world over. Thus one gets, by one’s thinking, reinforcementsfrom elsewhere for the realization of one’s desires; and the great pointin the conduct of life is to get the heavenly forces on one’s side byopening one’s own mind to their influx.On the whole, one is struck by a psychological similarity between themind-cure movement and the Lutheran and Wesleyan movements. Tothe believer in moralism and works, with his anxious query, “Whatshall I do to be saved?” Luther and Wesley replied: “You are saved now,if you would but believe it.” And the mind-curers come with preciselysimilar words of emancipation. They speak, it is true, to persons forwhom the conception of salvation has lost its ancient theological mean-102