The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experienceties and mean incentives once tyrannical hold no sway. The stonewall inside of him has fallen, the hardness in his heart has brokendown. The rest of us can, I think, imagine this by recalling our stateof feeling in those temporary “melting moods” into which eitherthe trials of real life, or the theatre, or a novel sometimes throws us.Especially if we weep! For it is then as if our tears broke through aninveterate inner dam, and let all sorts of ancient peccancies andmoral stagnancies drain away, leaving us now washed and soft ofheart and open to every nobler leading. With most of us the customaryhardness quickly returns, but not so with saintly persons.Many saints, even as energetic ones as Teresa and Loyola, have possessedwhat the church traditionally reveres as a special grace, theso-called gift of tears. In these persons the melting mood seems tohave held almost uninterrupted control. And as it is with tears andmelting moods, so it is with other exalted affections. Their reignmay come by gradual growth or by a crisis; but in either case it mayhave “come to stay.”At the end of the last lecture we saw this permanence to be true ofthe general paramountcy of the higher insight, even though in theebbs of emotional excitement meaner motives might temporarilyprevail and backsliding might occur. But that lower temptationsmay remain completely annulled, apart from transient emotion andas if by alteration of the man’s habitual nature, is also proved bydocumentary evidence in certain cases. Before embarking on thegeneral natural history of the regenerate character, let me convinceyou of this curious fact by one or two examples. The most numerousare those of reformed drunkards. You recollect the case of Mr.Hadley in the last lecture; the Jerry McAuley Water Street Missionabounds in similar instances.148 You also remember the graduate ofOxford, converted at three in the afternoon, and getting drunk in thehay-field the next day, but after that permanently cured of his appetite.“From that hour drink has had no terrors for me: I never touchit, never want it. The same thing occurred with my pipe… . the desirefor it went at once and has never returned. So with every known sin,148 Above, p. 200. “The only radical remedy I know for dipsomania isreligiomania,” is a saying I have heard quoted from some medical man.242