The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesresidual prudential guarantee is clung to, so long the surrender isincomplete, the vital crisis is not passed, fear still stands sentinel,and mistrust of the divine obtains: we hold by two anchors, lookingto God, it is true, after a fashion, but also holding by our propermachinations. In certain medical experiences we have the same criticalpoint to overcome. A drunkard, or a morphine or cocaine maniac,offers himself to be cured. He appeals to the doctor to weanhim from his enemy, but he dares not face blank abstinence. Thetyrannical drug is still an anchor to windward: he hides supplies ofit among his clothing; arranges secretly to have it smuggled in incase of need. Even so an incompletely regenerate man still trusts inhis own expedients. His money is like the sleeping potion which thechronically wakeful patient keeps beside his bed; he throws himselfon God, but if he should need the other help, there it will be also.Every one knows cases of this incomplete and ineffective desire forreform-drunkards whom, with all their self-reproaches and resolves,one perceives to be quite unwilling seriously to contemplate neverbeing drunk again! Really to give up anything on which we haverelied, to give it up definitely, “for good and all” and forever, signifiesone of those radical alterations of character which came underour notice in the lectures on conversion. In it the inner man rollsover into an entirely different position of equilibrium, lives in a newcentre of energy from this time on, and the turning-point and hingeof all such operations seems usually to involve the sincere acceptanceof certain nakednesses and destitutions.Accordingly, throughout the annals of the saintly life, we find thisever-recurring note: Fling yourself upon God’s providence withoutmaking any reserve whatever—take no thought for the morrow—sell all you have and give it to the poor—only when the sacrifice isruthless and reckless will the higher safety really arrive. As a concreteexample let me read a page from the biography of AntoinetteBourignon, a good woman, much persecuted in her day by bothProtestants and Catholics, because she would not take her religionat second hand. When a young girl, in her father’s house—“She spent whole nights in prayer, oft repeating: Lord, what wiltthou have me to do? And being one night in a most profound penitence,she said from the bottom of her heart: ‘O my Lord! What289