The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experiencedoes his vision of a better world console us for the generally prevailingprose and barrenness; but even when on the whole we have toconfess him ill adapted, he makes some converts, and the environmentgets better for his ministry. He is an effective ferment of goodness,a slow transmuter of the earthly into a more heavenly order.In this respect the Utopian dreams of social justice in which manycontemporary socialists and anarchists indulge are, in spite of their impracticabilityand non-adaptation to present environmental conditions,analogous to the saint’s belief in an existent kingdom of heaven. Theyhelp to break the edge of the general reign of hardness and are slowleavens of a better order.The next topic in order is Asceticism, which I fancy you are allready to consider without argument a virtue liable to extravaganceand excess. The optimism and refinement of the modern imaginationhas, as I have already said elsewhere, changed the attitude ofthe church towards corporeal mortification, and a Suso or a SaintPeter of Alcantara216 appear to us to-day rather in the light of tragictime to the story of the Gospel and of the Cross. We lived to see that chiefand all his tribe sitting in the school of Christ. And there is perhaps not anisland in these southern seas, amongst all those won for Christ, wheresimilar acts of heroism on the part of converts cannot be recited.” JohnG. Paton, Missionary to the New Hebrides, An Autobiography, secondpart, London, 1890, p. 243.216 Saint Peter, Saint Teresa tells us in her autobiography (French translation,p. 333), “had passed forty years without ever sleeping more than anhour and a half a day. Of all his mortifications, this was the one that hadcost him the most. To compass it, he kept always on his knees or on hisfeet. The little sleep he allowed nature to take was snatched in a sittingposture, his head leaning against a piece of wood fixed in the wall. Evenhad he wished to lie down, it would have been impossible, because his cellwas only four feet and a half long. In the course of all these years he neverraised his hood, no matter what the ardor of the sun or the rain’s strength.He never put on a shoe. He wore a garment of coarse sackcloth, withnothing else upon his skin. This garment was as scant as possible, and overit a little cloak of the same stuff. When the cold was great he took off thecloak and opened for a while the door and little window of his cell. Then322