The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesand in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner andbetter than the world that really is.43The advance of liberalism, so-called, in Christianity, during thepast fifty years, may fairly be called a victory of healthy-mindednesswithin the church over the morbidness with which the old hell-firetheology was more harmoniously related. We have now whole congregationswhose preachers, far from magnifying our consciousnessof sin, seem devoted rather to making little of it. They ignore, oreven deny, eternal punishment, and insist on the dignity rather thanon the depravity of man. They look at the continual preoccupationof the old-fashioned Christian with the salvation of his soul as somethingsickly and reprehensible rather than admirable; and a sanguineand “muscular” attitude. which to our forefathers would haveseemed purely heathen, has become in their eyes an ideal element ofChristian character. I am not asking whether or not they are right, Iam only pointing out the change. The persons to whom I refer havestill retained for the most part their nominal connection with Christianity,in spite of their discarding of its more pessimistic theologicalelements. But in that “theory of evolution” which, gatheringmomentum for a century, has within the past twenty-five years sweptso rapidly over Europe and America, we see the ground laid for anew sort of religion of Nature, which has entirely displaced Christianityfrom the thought of a large part of our generation. The ideaof a universal evolution lends itself to a doctrine of general meliorismand progress which fits the religious needs of the healthy-minded sowell that it seems almost as if it might have been created for theiruse. Accordingly we find “evolutionism” interpreted thus optimisticallyand embraced as a substitute for the religion they were bornin, by a multitude of our contemporaries who have either beentrained scientifically, or been fond of reading popular science, and43 “As I go on in this life, day by day, I become more of a bewilderedchild; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight,to hearing, the commonest things are a burthen. The prim, obliterated,polite surface of life, and the broad, bawdy and orgiastic—or maenadic—foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me. R. L.Stevenson: Letters, ii. 355.87