The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experienceand the torment of my mind being vastly greater. And it seemed tome that I found a perfect willingness, quietness, and alacrity of soulin consenting that it should be so, if it were most for the glory ofGod, so that there was no hesitation, doubt, or darkness in my mind.The glory of God seemed to overcome me and swallow me up, andevery conceivable suffering, and everything that was terrible to mynature, seemed to shrink to nothing before it. This resignation continuedin its clearness and brightness the rest of the night, and allthe next day, and the night following, and on Monday in the forenoon,without interruption or abatement.”160The annals of Catholic saintship abound in records as ecstatic ormore ecstatic than this. “Often the assaults of the divine love,” it issaid of the Sister Seraphique de la Martiniere, “reduced her almostto the point of death. She used tenderly to complain of this to God.‘I cannot support it,’ she used to say.‘Bear gently with my weakness, or I shall expire under the violenceof your love.’”161Let me pass next to the Charity and Brotherly Love which are ausual fruit of saintliness, and have always been reckoned essential theologicalvirtues, however limited may have been the kinds of servicewhich the particular theology enjoined. Brotherly love would followlogically from the assurance of God’s friendly presence, the notion ofour brotherhood as men being an immediate inference from that ofGod’s fatherhood of us all. When Christ utters the precepts: “Loveyour enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hateyou, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecuteyou,” he gives for a reason: “That ye may be the children of yourFather which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the eviland on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”One might therefore be tempted to explain both the humility as toone’s self and the charity towards others which characterize spiritualexcitement, as results of the all-leveling character of theistic belief.But these affections are certainly not mere derivatives of theism. We160 I have considerably abridged the words of the original, which is givenin Edwards’s Narrative of the Revival in New England.161 Bougaud: Hist. de la Bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, 1894, p. 125.252