The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jameseral” developments of Unitarianism and latitudinarianism generally,minds of this order have played and still are playing leadingand constructive parts. Emerson himself is an admirable example.Theodore Parker is another—here are a couple of characteristic passagesfrom Parker’s correspondence.34“Orthodox scholars say: ‘In the heathen classics you find no consciousnessof sin.’ It is very true—God be thanked for it. They wereconscious of wrath, of cruelty, avarice, drunkenness, lust, sloth, cowardice,and other actual vices, and struggled and got rid of the deformities,but they were not conscious of ‘enmity against God,’ anddidn’t sit down and whine and groan against non-existent evil. Ihave done wrong things enough in my life, and do them now; Imiss the mark, draw bow, and try again. But I am not conscious ofhating God, or man, or right, or love, and I know there is much‘health in me’, and in my body, even now, there dwelleth many agood thing, spite of consumption and Saint Paul.” In another letterParker writes: “I have swum in clear sweet waters all my days; and ifsometimes they were a little cold, and the stream ran adverse andsomething rough, it was never too strong to be breasted and swumthrough. From the days of earliest boyhood, when I went stumblingthrough the grass, … up to the gray-bearded manhood of thistime, there is none but has left me honey in the hive of memorythat I now feed on for present delight. When I recall the years … Iam filled with a sense of sweetness and wonder that such little thingscan make a mortal so exceedingly rich. But I must confess that thechiefest of all my delights is still the religious.”Another good expression of the “once-born” type of consciousness,developing straight and natural, with no element of morbidcompunction or crisis, is contained in the answer of Dr. EdwardEverett Hale, the eminent Unitarian preacher and writer, to one ofDr. Starbuck’s circulars. I quote a part of it:—“I observe, with profound regret, the religious struggles whichcome into many biographies, as if almost essential to the formationof the hero. I ought to speak of these, to say that any man has anadvantage, not to be estimated, who is born, as I was, into a family34 John Weiss: Life of Theodore Parker, i. 152, 32.79