The Varieties of Religious Experience | Page 6

to
me to be a channel of blood running down the streets, and the
market-place appeared like a pool of blood. When I had declared what
was upon me, and felt myself clear, I went out of the town in peace;
and returning to the shepherds gave them some money, and took my
shoes of them again. But the fire of the Lord was so on my feet, and all
over me, that I did not matter to put on my shoes again, and was at a
stand whether I should or no, till I felt freedom from the Lord so to do:
then, after I had washed my feet, I put on my shoes again. After this a
deep consideration came upon me, for what reason I should be sent to

cry against that city, and call it The bloody city! For though the
parliament had the minister one while, and the king another, and much
blood had been shed in the town during the wars between them, yet
there was no more than had befallen many other places. But afterwards
I came to understand, that in the Emperor Diocletian's time a thousand
Christians were martyr'd in Lichfield. So I was to go, without my shoes,
through the channel of their blood, and into the pool of their blood in
the market-place, that I might raise up the memorial of the blood of
those martyrs, which had been shed above a thousand years before, and
lay cold in their streets. So the sense of this blood was upon me, and I
obeyed the word of the Lord."
Bent as we are on studying religion's existential conditions, we cannot
possibly ignore these pathological aspects of the subject.
We must describe and name them just as if they occurred in
non-religious men. It is true that we instinctively recoil from seeing an
object to which our emotions and affections are committed handled by
the intellect as any other object is handled. The first thing the intellect
does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any
object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels
to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would
be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it
without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. "I am no
such thing, it would say; I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.
The next thing the intellect does is to lay bare the causes in which the
thing originates. Spinoza says: "I will analyze the actions and appetites
of men as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids." And
elsewhere he remarks that he will consider our passions and their
properties with the same eye with which he looks on all other natural
things, since the consequences of our affections flow from their nature
with the same necessity as it results from the nature of a triangle that its
three angles should be equal to two right angles. Similarly M. Taine, in
the introduction to his history of English literature, has written:
"Whether facts be moral or physical, it makes no matter. They always
have their causes. There are causes for ambition, courage, veracity, just

as there are for digestion, muscular movement, animal heat. Vice and
virtue are products like vitriol and sugar." When we read such
proclamations of the intellect bent on showing the existential
conditions of absolutely everything, we feel--quite apart from our
legitimate impatience at the somewhat ridiculous swagger of the
program, in view of what the authors are actually able to
perform--menaced and negated in the springs of our innermost life.
Such cold-blooded assimilations threaten, we think, to undo our soul's
vital secrets, as if the same breath which should succeed in explaining
their origin would simultaneously explain away their significance, and
make them appear of no more preciousness, either, than the useful
groceries of which M. Taine speaks.
Perhaps the commonest expression of this assumption that spiritual
value is undone if lowly origin be asserted is seen in those comments
which unsentimental people so often pass on their more sentimental
acquaintances. Alfred believes in immortality so strongly because his
temperament is so emotional. Fanny's extraordinary conscientiousness
is merely a matter of overinstigated nerves. William's melancholy about
the universe is due to bad digestion--probably his liver is torpid. Eliza's
delight in her church is a symptom of her hysterical constitution. Peter
would be less troubled about his soul if he would take more exercise in
the open air, etc. A more fully developed example of the same kind of
reasoning is the fashion, quite common nowadays among certain
writers, of criticizing the religious emotions by showing a connection