The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceIt is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhaps more oftenfeminine than masculine, and young than old, whose soul is of thissky-blue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and allenchanting innocencies than with dark human passions, who canthink no ill of man or God, and in whom religious gladness, being inpossession from the outset, needs no deliverance from any antecedentburden.“God has two families of children on this earth,” says Francis W.Newman,32 “the once-born and the twice-born,” and the oncebornhe describes as follows: “They see God, not as a strict Judge,not as a Glorious Potentate; but as the animating Spirit of a beautifulharmonious world, Beneficent and Kind, Merciful as well asPure. The same characters generally have no metaphysical tendencies:they do not look back into themselves. Hence they are notdistressed by their own imperfections: yet it would be absurd to callthem self-righteous; for they hardly think of themselves at all. Thischildlike quality of their nature makes the opening of religion veryhappy to them: for they no more shrink from God, than a childfrom an emperor, before whom the parent trembles: in fact, theyhave no vivid conception of any of the qualities in which the severerMajesty of God consists.33 He is to them the impersonation ofKindness and Beauty. They read his character, not in the disorderedworld of man, but in romantic and harmonious nature. Of humansin they know perhaps little in their own hearts and not very muchin the world; and human suffering does but melt them to tenderness.Thus, when they approach God, no inward disturbance ensues;and without being as yet spiritual, they have a certain complacencyand perhaps romantic sense of excitement in their simpleworship.”In the Romish Church such characters find a more congenial soilto grow in than in Protestantism, whose fashions of feeling havebeen set by minds of a decidedly pessimistic order. But even in Protestantismthey have been abundant enough; and in its recent “lib-32 The Soul; its Sorrows and its Aspirations, 3d edition, 1852, pp. 89, 91.33 I once heard a lady describe the pleasure it gave her to think that she“could always cuddle up to God.”78