The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamessequence of the failure of simply giving alms. The whole history ofconstitutional government is a commentary on the excellence ofresisting evil, and when one cheek is smitten, of smiting back andnot turning the other cheek also.You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spiteof Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, you believe in fighting fire withfire, in shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezingout vagabonds and swindlers.And yet you are sure, as I am sure, that were the world confined tothese hard-headed, hard-hearted, and hard-fisted methods exclusively,were there no one prompt to help a brother first, and find outafterwards whether he were worthy; no one willing to drown hisprivate wrongs in pity for the wronger’s person; no one ready to beduped many a time rather than live always on suspicion; no oneglad to treat individuals passionately and impulsively rather than bygeneral rules of prudence; the world would be an infinitely worseplace than it is now to live in. The tender grace, not of a day that isdead, but of a day yet to be born somehow, with the golden rulegrown natural, would be cut out from the perspective of our imaginations.The saints, existing in this way, may, with their extravagances ofhuman tenderness, be prophetic. Nay, innumerable times they haveproved themselves prophetic. Treating those whom they met, in spiteof the past, in spite of all appearances, as worthy, they have stimulatedthem to BE worthy, miraculously transformed them by theirradiant example and by the challenge of their expectation.From this point of view we may admit the human charity whichwe find in all saints, and the great excess of it which we find in somesaints, to be a genuinely creative social force, tending to make real adegree of virtue which it alone is ready to assume as possible. Thesaints are authors, auctores, increasers, of goodness. The potentialitiesof development in human souls are unfathomable. So manywho seemed irretrievably hardened have in point of fact been softened,converted, regenerated, in ways that amazed the subjects evenmore than they surprised the spectators, that we never can be surein advance of any man that his salvation by the way of love is hopeless.We have no right to speak of human crocodiles and boa-con-319