The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceWhen we take up the phenomena of revivalistic conversion, weshall learn something more about all this. Meanwhile I will say abrief word about the mind-curer’s methods.They are of course largely suggestive. The suggestive influence ofenvironment plays an enormous part in all spiritual education.But the word “suggestion,” having acquired official status, is unfortunatelyalready beginning to play in many quarters the part of awet blanket upon investigation, being used to fend off all inquiryinto the varying susceptibilities of individual cases. “Suggestion” isonly another name for the power of ideas, so far as they prove efficaciousover belief and conduct. Ideas efficacious over some people proveinefficacious over others. Ideas efficacious at some times and in somehuman surroundings are not so at other times and elsewhere. Theideas of Christian churches are not efficacious in the therapeuticdirection to-day, whatever they may have been in earlier centuries;and when the whole question is as to why the salt has lost its savorhere or gained it there, the mere blank waving of the word “suggestion”as if it were a banner gives no light. Dr. Goddard, whose candidpsychological essay on Faith Cures ascribes them to nothing butordinary suggestion, concludes by saying that “Religion [and bythis he seems to mean our popular Christianity] has in it all there isin mental therapeutics, and has it in its best form. Living up to [ourreligious] ideas will do anything for us that can be done.” And thisin spite of the actual fact that the popular Christianity does absolutelynothing, or did nothing until mind-cure came to the rescue.5555 Within the churches a disposition has always prevailed to regard sicknessas a visitation; something sent by God for our good, either as chastisement,as warning, or as opportunity for exercising virtue, and, in theCatholic Church, of earning “merit.” “Illness,” says a good Catholic writerP. Lejeune: (Introd. a la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 218), “is the most excellentcorporeal mortifications, the mortification which one has not one’sself chosen, which is imposed directly by God, and is the direct expressionof his will. ‘If other mortifications are of silver,’ Mgr. Gay says, ‘this one isof gold; since although it comes of ourselves, coming as it does of originalsin, still on its greater side, as coming (like all that happens) from theprovidence of God, it is of divine manufacture. And how just are its blows!And how efficacious it is! … I do not hesitate to say that patience in a long106