The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceProceeding onwards in our search of religious extravagance, wenext come upon excesses of Tenderness and Charity. Here saintlinesshas to face the charge of preserving the unfit, and breedingparasites and beggars. “Resist not evil,” “Love your enemies,” theseare saintly maxims of which men of this world find it hard to speakwithout impatience. Are the men of this world right, or are thesaints in possession of the deeper range of truth?No simple answer is possible. Here, if anywhere, one feels thecomplexity of the moral life, and the mysteriousness of the way inwhich facts and ideals are interwoven.Perfect conduct is a relation between three terms: the actor, theobjects for which he acts, and the recipients of the action. In orderthat conduct should be abstractly perfect, all three terms, intention,execution, and reception, should be suited to one another. The bestintention will fail if it either work by false means or address itself tothe wrong recipient. Thus no critic or estimator of the value of conductcan confine himself to the actor’s animus alone, apart from theother elements of the performance. As there is no worse lie than atruth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments,challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, arefolly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.The saint may simply give the universe into the hands of theenemy by his trustfulness. He may by non-resistance cut off hisown survival.Herbert Spencer tells us that the perfect man’s conduct will appearperfect only when the environment is perfect: to no inferiorenvironment is it suitably adapted. We may paraphrase this by cordiallyadmitting that saintly conduct would be the most perfect conductconceivable in an environment where all were saints already;but by adding that in an environment where few are saints, andmany the exact reverse of saints, it must be ill adapted. We mustfrankly confess, then, using our empirical common sense and ordinarypractical prejudices, that in the world that actually is, the virtuesof sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be, and oftenhave been, manifested in excess.The powers of darkness have systematically taken advantage ofthem. The whole modern scientific organization of charity is a con-318