The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceLectures es IV and VTHE RELIGION OF HEALTHY MINDEDNESSIF WE WERE to ask the question: “What is human life’s chief concern?”one of the answers we should receive would be: “It is happiness.”How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is infact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and ofall they are willing to endure. The hedonistic school in ethics deducesthe moral life wholly from the experiences of happiness andunhappiness which different kinds of conduct bring; and, even morein the religious life than in the moral life, happiness and unhappinessseem to be the poles round which the interest revolves. Weneed not go so far as to say with the author whom I lately quotedthat any persistent enthusiasm is, as such, religion, nor need we callmere laughter a religious exercise; but we must admit that any persistentenjoyment may produce the sort of religion which consists ina grateful admiration of the gift of so happy an existence; and wemust also acknowledge that the more complex ways of experiencingreligion are new manners of producing happiness, wonderful innerpaths to a supernatural kind of happiness, when the first gift ofnatural existence is unhappy, as it so often proves itself to be.With such relations between religion and happiness, it is perhapsnot surprising that men come to regard the happiness which a religiousbelief affords as a proof of its truth. If a creed makes a manfeel happy, he almost inevitably adopts it. Such a belief ought to betrue; therefore it is true—such, rightly or wrongly, is one of the“immediate inferences” of the religious logic used by ordinary men.“The near presence of God’s spirit,” says a German writer,31 “maybe experienced in its reality—indeed only experienced. And the markby which the spirit’s existence and nearness are made irrefutablyclear to those who have ever had the experience is the utterly incomparablefeeling of happiness which is connected with the near-31 C. Hilty: Gluck, dritter Theil, 1900, p. 18.76