The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experiencewe act in our own concerns. Again, one finds that one can wait foreverything patiently, and that is one of life’s great arts. One finds alsothat each thing comes duly, one thing after the other, so that onegains time to make one’s footing sure before advancing farther. Andthen every thing occurs to us at the right moment, just what we oughtto do, etc., and often in a very striking way, just as if a third personwere keeping watch over those things which we are in easy danger offorgetting.“Often, too, persons are sent to us at the right time, to offer or askfor what is needed, and what we should never have had the courageor resolution to undertake of our own accord.“Through all these experiences one finds that one is kindly andtolerant of other people, even of such as are repulsive, negligent, orill-willed, for they also are instruments of good in God’s hand, andoften most efficient ones. Without these thoughts it would be hardfor even the best of us always to keep our equanimity. But with theconsciousness of divine guidance, one sees many a thing in life quitedifferently from what would otherwise be possible.“All these are things that every human being knows, who has hadexperience of them; and of which the most speaking examples couldbe brought forward. The highest resources of worldly wisdom areunable to attain that which, under divine leading, comes to us of itsown accord.”314Such accounts as this shade away into others where the belief is,not that particular events are tempered more towardly to us by asuperintending providence, as a reward for our reliance, but that bycultivating the continuous sense of our connection with the powerthat made things as they are, we are tempered more towardly fortheir reception. The outward face of nature need not alter, but theexpressions of meaning in it alter. It was dead and is alive again. It islike the difference between looking on a person without love, orupon the same person with love. In the latter case intercourse springsinto new vitality. So when one’s affections keep in touch with thedivinity of the world’s authorship, fear and egotism fall away; andin the equanimity that follows, one finds in the hours, as they suc-314 C. Hilty: Gluck, Dritter Theil, 1900, pp. 92 ff.420