The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceThese words are of course literally true. The immediate aim of thesoldier’s life is, as Moltke said, destruction, and nothing but destruction;and whatever constructions wars result in are remote andnon-military. Consequently the soldier cannot train himself to betoo feelingless to all those usual sympathies and respects, whetherfor persons or for things, that make for conservation. Yet the factremains that war is a school of strenuous life and heroism; and,being in the line of aboriginal instinct, is the only school that as yetis universally available. But when we gravely ask ourselves whetherthis wholesale organization of irrationality and crime be our onlybulwark against effeminacy, we stand aghast at the thought, andthink more kindly of ascetic religion. One hears of the mechanicalequivalent of heat. What we now need to discover in the social realmis the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak tomen as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible withtheir spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible. Ihave often thought that in the old monkish poverty-worship, inspite of the pedantry which infested it, there might be somethinglike that moral equivalent of war which we are seeking. May notvoluntarily accepted poverty be “the strenuous life,” without theneed of crushing weaker peoples?Poverty indeed is the strenuous life—without brass bands or uniformsor hysteric popular applause or lies or circumlocutions; andwhen one sees the way in which wealth- getting enters as an idealinto the very bone and marrow of our generation, one wonderswhether a revival of the belief that poverty is a worthy religiousvocation may not be “the transformation of military courage,” andthe spiritual reform which our time stands most in need of.Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises ofpoverty need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literallyafraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in orderto simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the generalscramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem himspiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even ofimagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant:the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, themanlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and328