The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesnot by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any momentirresponsibly—the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fightingshape. When we of the so-called better classes are scared as menwere never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; whenwe put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at thethought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed tomanual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanlyand irreligious a state of opinion.It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exerciseto ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen.But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewherethe desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chiefbreeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There are thousandsof conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave,whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman.Think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty wouldgive us if we were devoted to unpopular causes. We need no longerhold our tongues or fear to vote the revolutionary or reformatoryticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes of promotion vanish, oursalaries stop, our club doors close in our faces; yet, while we lived,we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit, and our examplewould help to set free our generation. The cause would need itsfunds, but we its servants would be potent in proportion as we personallywere contented with our poverty.I recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certainthat the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes isthe worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.I have now said all that I can usefully say about the several fruitsof religion as they are manifested in saintly lives, so I will make abrief review and pass to my more general conclusions.Our question, you will remember, is as to whether religion standsapproved by its fruits, as these are exhibited in the saintly type ofcharacter. Single attributes of saintliness may, it is true, be temperamentalendowments, found in non-religious individuals. But thewhole group of them forms a combination which, as such, is religious,for it seems to flow from the sense of the divine as from itspsychological centre. Whoever possesses strongly this sense comes329