The Varieties of Religious Experience | Page 5

following lectures the phenomena of
religious experience must be considered. When I handle them
biologically and psychologically as if they were mere curious facts of
individual history, some of you may think it a degradation of so
sublime a subject, and may even suspect me, until my purpose gets
more fully expressed, of deliberately seeking to discredit the religious
side of life.

Such a result is of course absolutely alien to my intention; and since
such a prejudice on your part would seriously obstruct the due effect of
much of what I have to relate, I will devote a few more words to the
point.
There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life,
exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and
eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who
follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be
Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for
him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed
forms by imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to
study this second-hand religious life. We must make search rather for
the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass
of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can
only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but
as an acute fever rather. But such individuals are "geniuses" in the
religious line; and like many other geniuses who have brought forth
fruits effective enough for commemoration in the pages of biography,
such religious geniuses have often shown symptoms of nervous
instability. Even more perhaps than other kinds of genius, religious
leaders have been subject to abnormal psychical visitations. Invariably
they have been creatures of exalted emotional sensibility. Often they
have led a discordant inner life, and had melancholy during a part of
their career. They have known no measure, been liable to obsessions
and fixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard
voices, seen visions, and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are
ordinarily classed as pathological. Often, moreover, these pathological
features in their career have helped to give them their religious
authority and influence.
If you ask for a concrete example, there can be no better one than is
furnished by the person of George Fox. The Quaker religion which he
founded is something which it is impossible to overpraise. In a day of
shams, it was a religion of veracity rooted in spiritual inwardness, and a
return to something more like the original gospel truth than men had
ever known in England. So far as our Christian sects today are evolving

into liberality, they are simply reverting in essence to the position
which Fox and the early Quakers so long ago assumed. No one can
pretend for a moment that in point of spiritual sagacity and capacity,
Fox's mind was unsound. Everyone who confronted him personally,
from Oliver Cromwell down to county magistrates and jailers, seems to
have acknowledged his superior power. Yet from the point of view of
his nervous constitution, Fox was a psychopath or detraque of the
deepest dye. His Journal abounds in entries of this sort:--
"As I was walking with several friends, I lifted up my head and saw
three steeple-house spires, and they struck at my life. I asked them what
place that was? They said, Lichfield. Immediately the word of the Lord
came to me, that I must go thither. Being come to the house we were
going to, I wished the friends to walk into the house, saying nothing to
them of whither I was to go. As soon as they were gone I stept away,
and went by my eye over hedge and ditch till I came within a mile of
Lichfield where, in a great field, shepherds were keeping their sheep.
Then was I commanded by the Lord to pull off my shoes. I stood still,
for it was winter: but the word of the Lord was like a fire in me. So I
put off my shoes and left them with the shepherds; and the poor
shepherds trembled, and were astonished. Then I walked on about a
mile, and as soon as I was got within the city, the word of the Lord
came to me again, saying: Cry, 'Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield!' So
I went up and down the streets, crying with a loud voice, Wo to the
bloody city of Lichfield! It being market day, I went into the
market-place, and to and fro in the several parts of it, and made stands,
crying as before, Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield! And no one laid
hands on me. As I went thus crying through the streets, there seemed