The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesshining and transfigured to the convert,155 and, apart from anythingacutely religious, we all have moments when the universal lifeseems to wrap us round with friendliness. In youth and health, insummer, in the woods or on the mountains, there come days whenthe weather seems all whispering with peace, hours when the goodnessand beauty of existence enfold us like a dry warm climate, orchime through us as if our inner ears were subtly ringing with theworld’s security. Thoreau writes:—“Once, a few weeks after I came to the woods, for an hour I doubtedwhether the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a sereneand healthy life. To be alone was somewhat unpleasant. But, in themidst of a gentle rain, while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenlysensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in thevery pattering of the drops, and in every sight and sound aroundmy house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once,like an atmosphere, sustaining me, as made the fancied advantagesof human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought ofthem since. Every little pine-needle expanded and swelled with sympathyand befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of thepresence of something kindred to me, that I thought no place couldever be strange to me again.”156In the Christian consciousness this sense of the enveloping friendlinessbecomes most personal and definite. “The compensation,”writes a German author,—”for the loss of that sense of personalindependence which man so unwillingly gives up, is the disappearanceof all fear from one’s life, the quite indescribable and inexplicablefeeling of an inner security, which one can only experience,but which, once it has been experienced, one can never forget.”157I find an excellent description of this state of mind in a sermon byMr. Voysey:—“It is the experience of myriads of trustful souls, that this sense ofGod’s unfailing presence with them in their going out and in theircoming in, and by night and day, is a source of absolute repose andconfident calmness. It drives away all fear of what may befall them.156 H. Thoreau: Walden, Riverside edition, p. 206, abridged.157 C. H. Hilty: Gluck, vol. i. p. 85.249