The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experiencetered on the path, the God of Jesus Christ, to whom I then hadlearned to give myself up, little by little did the rest.”130It is needless to remind you once more of the admirable congruityof Protestant theology with the structure of the mind as shown insuch experiences. In the extreme of melancholy the self that consciouslyis can do absolutely nothing. It is completely bankrupt andwithout resource, and no works it can accomplish will avail. Redemptionfrom such subjective conditions must be a free gift ornothing, and grace through Christ’s accomplished sacrifice is such agift.“God,” says Luther, “is the God of the humble, the miserable, theoppressed, and the desperate, and of those that are brought even tonothing; and his nature is to give sight to the blind, to comfort thebroken-hearted, to justify sinners, to save the very desperate anddamned. Now that pernicious and pestilent opinion of man’s ownrighteousness, which will not be a sinner, unclean, miserable, anddamnable, but righteous and holy, suffereth not God to come to hisown natural and proper work. Therefore God must take this maulin hand (the law, I mean) to beat in pieces and bring to nothing thisbeast with her vain confidence, that she may so learn at length byher own misery that she is utterly forlorn and damned. But herelieth the difficulty, that when a man is terrified and cast down, he isso little able to raise himself up again and say, ‘Now I am bruisedand afflicted enough; now is the time of grace; now is the time tohear Christ.’ The foolishness of man’s heart is so great that then herather seeketh to himself more laws to satisfy his conscience. ‘If Ilive,’ saith he, ‘I will amend my life: I will do this, I will do that.’But here, except thou do the quite contrary, except thou send Mosesaway with his law, and in these terrors and this anguish lay holdupon Christ who died for thy sins, look for no salvation. Thy cowl,thy shaven crown, thy chastity, thy obedience, thy poverty, thy works,thy merits? what shall all these do? what shall the law of Mosesavail? If I, wretched and damnable sinner, through works or merits130 I piece together a quotation made by W. Monod, in his book la Vie,and a letter printed in the work: Adolphe Monod: I,. Souvenirs de sa Vie,1885, p. 433.222