The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesbody asserted itself, and with a desperate gymnastic effort I regainedthe boom. How I furled the sail I don’t know, but I sang at the utmostpitch of my voice praises to God that went pealing out over the darkwaste of waters.”172The annals of martyrdom are of course the signal field of triumphfor religious imperturbability. Let me cite as an example the statementof a humble sufferer, persecuted as a Huguenot under LouisXIV:—“They shut all the doors,” Blanche Gamond writes, “and I saw sixwomen, each with a bunch of willow rods as thick as the hand couldhold, and a yard long. He gave me the order, ‘Undress yourself,’which I did. He said, ‘You are leaving on your shift; you must takeit off.’ They had so little patience that they took it off themselves,and I was naked from the waist up. They brought a cord with whichthey tied me to a beam in the kitchen. They drew the cord tightwith all their strength and asked me, ‘Does it hurt you?’ and thenthey discharged their fury upon me, exclaiming as they struck me,‘Pray now to your God.’ It was the Roulette woman who held thislanguage. But at this moment I received the greatest consolationthat I can ever receive in my life, since I had the honor of beingwhipped for the name of Christ, and in addition of being crownedwith his mercy and his consolations. Why can I not write down theinconceivable influences, consolations, and peace which I felt interiorly?To understand them one must have passed by the same trial;they were so great that I was ravished, for there where afflictionsabound grace is given superabundantly. In vain the women cried,‘We must double our blows; she does not feel them, for she neitherspeaks nor cries.’ And how should I have cried, since I was swooningwith happiness within?”173The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, toequanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all thoseshiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of the personal centreof energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of itis that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing172 Op. cit., London, 1901, p. 230.173 Claparede et Goty: Deux Heroines de la Foi, Paris, 1880, p. 112.261