The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experienceable, and intrenched, these elements of suggestive efficacy will be lost.In its acuter stages every religion must be a homeless Arab of thedesert. The church knows this well enough, with its everlasting innerstruggle of the acute religion of the few against the chronic religion ofthe many, indurated into an obstructiveness worse than that whichirreligion opposes to the movings of the Spirit. “We may pray,” saysJonathan Edwards, “concerning all those saints that are not lively Christians,that they may either be enlivened, or taken away; if that be truethat is often said by some at this day, that these cold dead saints domore hurt than natural men, and lead more souls to hell, and that itwould be well for mankind if they were all dead.”[56]The next condition of success is the apparent existence, in largenumbers, of minds who unite healthy-mindedness with readinessfor regeneration by letting go. Protestantism has been too pessimisticas regards the natural man, Catholicism has been too legalisticand moralistic, for either the one or the other to appeal in any generousway to the type of character formed of this peculiar minglingof elements. However few of us here present may belong to such atype, it is now evident that it forms a specific moral combination,well represented in the world.Finally, mind-cure has made what in our protestant countries is anunprecedentedly great use of the subconscious life. To their reasonedadvice and dogmatic assertion, its founders have added systematicexercise in passive relaxation, concentration, and meditation, and haveeven invoked something like hypnotic practice. I quote some passagesat random:—“The value, the potency of ideals is the great practical truth on whichthe New Thought most strongly insists—the development namelyfrom within outward, from small to great.57 Consequently one’sthought should be centred on the ideal outcome, even though thistrust be literally like a step in the dark.58 To attain the ability thus56 Edwards, from whose book on the Revival in New England I quotethese words, dissuades from such a use of prayer, but it is easy to see thathe enjoys making his thrust at the cold dead church members.57 H. W. DRESSER: Voices of Freedom, 46.58 Dresser: Living by the spirit, 58.108