The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experiencewho gets converted. There are higher and lower limits of possibilityset to each personal life. If a flood but goes above one’s head, itsabsolute elevation becomes a matter of small importance; and whenwe touch our own upper limit and live in our own highest centre ofenergy, we may call ourselves saved, no matter how much highersome one else’s centre may be. A small man’s salvation will always bea great salvation and the greatest of all facts for him, and we shouldremember this when the fruits of our ordinary evangelicism lookdiscouraging. Who knows how much less ideal still the lives of thesespiritual grubs and earthworms, these Crumps and Stigginses, mighthave been, if such poor grace as they have received had never touchedthem at all?126If we roughly arrange human beings in classes, each class standingfor a grade of spiritual excellence, I believe we shall find naturalmen and converts both sudden and gradual in all the classes. Theforms which regenerative change effects have, then, no general spiritualsignificance, but only a psychological significance. We have seenhow Starbuck’s laborious statistical studies tend to assimilate conversionto ordinary spiritual growth. Another American psychologist,Prof. George A. Coe,127 has analyzed the cases of seventysevenconverts or ex-candidates for conversion, known to him, andthe results strikingly confirm the view that sudden conversion isconnected with the possession of an active subliminal self. Examininghis subjects with reference to their hypnotic sensibility and tosuch automatisms as hypnagogic hallucinations, odd impulses, religiousdreams about the time of their conversion, etc., he found these126 Emerson writes: “When we see a soul whose acts are regal, gracefuland pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are,and not turn sourly on the angel and say: Crump is a better man, with hisgrunting resistance to all his native devils.” True enough. Yet Crump mayreally be the better crump, for his inner discords and second birth; andyour once-born “regal” character though indeed always better than poorCrump, may fall far short of what he individually might be had he onlysome Crump-like capacity for compunction over his own peculiardiabolisms, graceful and pleasant and invariably gentlemanly as these maybe.127 In his book, The Spiritual Life, New York, 1900.218