The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experienceelements in conversion, and their relations to individual lives deserveto be discriminated.107Some persons, for instance, never are, and possibly never underany circumstances could be, converted. Religious ideas cannot becomethe centre of their spiritual energy. They may be excellentpersons, servants of God in practical ways, but they are not childrenof his kingdom. They are either incapable of imagining the invisible;or else, in the language of devotion, they are life-long subjectsof “barrenness” and “dryness.” Such inaptitude for religious faithmay in some cases be intellectual in its origin. Their religious facultiesmay be checked in their natural tendency to expand, by beliefsabout the world that are inhibitive, the pessimistic and materialisticbeliefs, for example, within which so many good souls, who in formertimes would have freely indulged their religious propensities, findthemselves nowadays, as it were, frozen; or the agnostic vetoes uponfaith as something weak and shameful, under which so many of ustoday lie cowering, afraid to use our instincts. In many persons suchinhibitions are never overcome. To the end of their days they refuseto believe, their personal energy never gets to its religious centre,and the latter remains inactive in perpetuity.In other persons the trouble is profounder. There are men anaestheticon the religious side, deficient in that category of sensibility.Just as a bloodless organism can never, in spite of all its goodwill,attain to the reckless “animal spirits” enjoyed by those of sanguinetemperament; so the nature which is spiritually barren may admireand envy faith in others, but can never compass the enthusiasm andpeace which those who are temperamentally qualified for faith enjoy.All this may, however, turn out eventually to have been a matterof temporary inhibition. Even late in life some thaw, some releasemay take place, some bolt be shot back in the barrenest breast, andthe man’s hard heart may soften and break into religious feeling.Such cases more than any others suggest the idea that sudden conversionis by miracle. So long as they exist, we must not imagine107 Starbuck, in addition to “escape from sin,” discriminates “spiritualillumination” as a distinct type of conversion experience. Psychology ofReligion, p. 85.188