The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesleft lying in your minds until I come to a much later lecture, whenI hope once more to gather these dropped threads together intomore definitive conclusions. The notion of a subconscious self certainlyought not at this point of our inquiry to be held to exclude allnotion of a higher penetration.If there be higher powers able to impress us, they may get accessto us only through the subliminal door.Let us turn now to the feelings which immediately fill the hour ofthe conversion experience. The first one to be noted is just this senseof higher control. It is not always, but it is very often present. Wesaw examples of it in Alline, Bradley, Brainerd, and elsewhere. Theneed of such a higher controlling agency is well expressed in theshort reference which the eminent French Protestant AdolpheMonod makes to the crisis of his own conversion. It was at Naplesin his early manhood, in the summer of 1827.“My sadness,” he says, “was without limit, and having got entirepossession of me, it filled my life from the most indifferent externalacts to the most secret thoughts, and corrupted at their source myfeelings, my judgment, and my happiness. It was then that I sawthat to expect to put a stop to this disorder by my reason and mywill, which were themselves diseased, would be to act like a blindman who should pretend to correct one of his eyes by the aid of theother equally blind one. I had then no resource save in some influencefrom without. I remembered the promise of the Holy Ghost;and what the positive declarations of the Gospel had never succeededin bringing home to me, I learned at last from necessity, andbelieved, for the first time in my life, in this promise, in the onlysense in which it answered the needs of my soul, in that, namely, ofa real external supernatural action, capable of giving me thoughts,and taking them away from me, and exerted on me by a God astruly master of my heart as he is of the rest of nature. Renouncingthen all merit, all strength, abandoning all my personal resources,and acknowledging no other title to his mercy than my own uttermisery, I went home and threw myself on my knees and prayed as Inever yet prayed in my life. From this day onwards a new interiorlife began for me: not that my melancholy had disappeared, but ithad lost its sting. Hope had entered into my heart, and once en-221