The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamessimple, ignorance of ill, but something vastly more complex, includingnatural evil as one of its elements, but finding natural evilno such stumbling-block and terror because it now sees it swallowedup in supernatural good. The process is one of redemption,not of mere reversion to natural health, and the sufferer, when saved,is saved by what seems to him a second birth, a deeper kind ofconscious being than he could enjoy before.We find a somewhat different type of religious melancholy enshrinedin literature in John Bunyan’s autobiography. Tolstoy’s preoccupationswere largely objective, for the purpose and meaning oflife in general was what so troubled him; but poor Bunyan’s troubleswere over the condition of his own personal self. He was a typicalcase of the psychopathic temperament, sensitive of conscience to adiseased degree, beset by doubts, fears and insistent ideas, and avictim of verbal automatisms, both motor and sensory. These wereusually texts of Scripture which, sometimes damnatory and sometimesfavorable, would come in a half- hallucinatory form as if theywere voices, and fasten on his mind and buffet it between them likea shuttlecock. Added to this were a fearful melancholy self-contemptand despair.“Nay, thought I, now I grow worse and worse, now I am fartherfrom conversion than ever I was before. If now I should have burnedat the stake, I could not believe that Christ had love for me; alas, Icould neither hear him, nor see him, nor feel him, nor savor any ofhis things. Sometimes I would tell my condition to the people ofGod, which, when they heard, they would pity me, and would tellof the Promises. But they had as good have told me that I mustreach the Sun with my finger as have bidden me receive or relyupon the Promise. [Yet] all this while as to the act of sinning, Inever was more tender than now; I durst not take a pin or stick,though but so big as a straw, for my conscience now was sore, andwould smart at every touch; I could not tell how to speak my words,for fear I should misplace them. Oh, how gingerly did I then go, inall I did or said! I found myself as on a miry bog that shook if I didbut stir; and was as there left both by God and Christ, and thespirit, and all good things.“But my original and inward pollution, that was my plague and145