The Faith of the Millions | Page 8

the will; but though
supernatural, such graces are not held to be miraculous or preternatural,
or to break the usual psychological laws of cause and effect; like the
ordinary answers to prayer, they are from God's ordinary providence in
that supernatural order which permeates but does not of itself interfere
with the natural. But over and above what, relatively to our observation,
we call the "ordinary" course, there is the extraordinary, whose
interference with it is apparent, though of course not absolute or
real--since nothing can be out of harmony with the first and highest law,
which is God Himself. And to the category of the extraordinary must
be assigned such inspirations and direct will-movements as we here
speak of. [5]
Yet not altogether; for in the natural order, too, we have the
phenomenon of instinct to consider--both spiritual and animal. Giving
heredity all the credit we can for storing up accumulated experience in
the nervous system of each species, there remains a host of
fundamental animal instincts which that law is quite inadequate to
explain; those, for example, which govern the multiplication of the
species and secure the conditions under which alone heredity can work.
Such cannot be at once the effect and the essential condition of heredity;
and yet they are, of all instincts, the most complex and mysterious.
Indeed, it seems more scientific to ascribe other instincts to the same
known and indubitable, if mysterious, cause, than to seek explanation
in causes less known and more hypothetical. In the case of many
instincts, it would seem that the craving for the object precedes the
distinct cognition of it; that the object is only ascertained when, after
various tentative gropings, it is stumbled upon, almost, it might seem,
by chance. And this seems true, also, of some of our fundamental
spiritual instincts; for example, that craving of the mind for an unified
experience, which is at the root of all mental activity, and whose object
is ever approached yet never attained; or, again, there is the social and
political instinct, which has not yet formed a distinct and satisfying
conception of what it would be at. Or nearer still to our theme, is the

natural religious instinct which seeks interpretations and explanatory
hypotheses in the various man-made religions of the race, and which
finds itself satisfied and transcended by the Christian revelation.
In these and like instances, we find will-movements not caused by the
subjects' own cognitions and perceptions, but contrariwise, giving birth
to cognitions, setting the mind to work to interpret the said movements,
and to seek out their satisfying objects.
This is quite analogous to certain phenomena of the order of grace. St.
Ignatius almost invariably speaks, not, as we should, of thoughts that
give rise to will-states of "consolation" or "desolation," but conversely,
of these will-states giving rise to congruous thoughts. Indeed, nothing
is more familiar to us than the way in which the mind is magnetized by
even our physical states of elation or depression, to select the more
cheerful or the gloomier aspects of life, according as we are under one
influence or the other; and in practice, we recognize the effect of
people's humours on their opinions and decisions, and would neither
sue mercy nor ask a favour of a man in a temper. In short, it is hardly
too much to say, that our thoughts are more dependent on our feelings
than our feelings on our thoughts. This, then, is one possible method of
supernatural guidance which we shall call "blind inspiration"--for
though the feeling or impulse is from God, the interpretation is from
the subject's own mind. It is curious how St. Ignatius applies this
method to the determining of the Divine will in certain cases--as it were,
by the inductive principle of "concomitant variation." A suggestion that
always comes and grows with a state of "consolation," and whose
negative is in like manner associated with "desolation," is presumably
the right interpretation of the blind impulse. [6] And perhaps this is one
of the commonest subjective assurances of faith, namely, that our faith
grows and declines with what we know intuitively to be our better
moods; that when lax we are sceptical, and believing when
conscientious.
Another species of will-guidance recognized by saints, is not so much
by way of a vague feeling seeking interpretation, as by way of a sort of
enforced decision with regard to some naturally suggested course of

conduct. And this, perhaps, is what is more technically understood by
an inspiration; as, for example, when the question of writing or not
writing something publicly useful, say, the records of the Kings of
Israel, rises in the mind, and it is decided for and in the subject, but not
by him. Of course this "inspiration" is a common but