Lectures XIV and XV

 

The Value Of Saintliness

 

WE have now passed in review the more important of the phenomena which are regarded as fruits of genuine religion and characteristics of men who are devout.  Today we have to change our attitude from that of description to that of appreciation; we have to ask whether the fruits in question can help us to judge the absolute value of what religion adds to human life.  Were I to parody Kant, I should say that a "Critique of pure Saintliness" must be our theme.

 

If, in turning to this theme, we could descend upon our subject from above like Catholic theologians, with our fixed definitions of man and man's perfection and our positive dogmas about God, we should have an easy time of it.  Man's perfection would be the fulfillment of his end; and his end would be union with his Maker.  That union could be pursued by him along three paths, active, purgative, and contemplative, respectively; and progress along either path would be a simple matter to measure by the application of a limited number of theological and moral conceptions and definitions.  The absolute significance and value of any bit of religious experience we might hear of would thus be given almost mathematically into our hands.

 

If convenience were everything, we ought now to grieve at finding ourselves cut off from so admirably convenient a method as this.  But we did cut ourselves off from it deliberately in those remarks which you remember we made, in our first lecture, about the empirical method; and it must be <321> confessed that after that act of renunciation we can never hope for clean-cut and scholastic results.  WE cannot divide man sharply into an animal and a rational part.  WE cannot distinguish natural from supernatural effects; nor among the latter know which are favors of God, and which are counterfeit operations of the demon.  WE have merely to collect things together without any special a priori theological system, and out of an aggregate of piecemeal judgments as to the value of this and that experience--judgments in which our general philosophic prejudices, our instincts, and our common sense are our only guides--decide that ON THE WHOLE one type of religion is approved by its fruits, and another type condemned.  "On the whole"--I fear we shall never escape complicity with that qualification, so dear to your practical man, so repugnant to your systematizer!

 

I also fear that as I make this frank confession, I may seem to some of you to throw our compass overboard, and to adopt caprice as our pilot.  Skepticism or wayward choice, you may think, can be the only results of such a formless method as I have taken up. A few remarks in deprecation of such an opinion, and in farther explanation of the empiricist principles which I profess, may therefore appear at this point to be in place.

 

Abstractly, it would seem illogical to try to measure the worth of a religion's fruits in merely human terms of value. How CAN you measure their worth without considering whether the God really exists who is supposed to inspire them?  If he really exists, then all the conduct instituted by men to meet his wants must necessarily be a reasonable fruit of his religion--it would be unreasonable only in case he did not exist.  If, for instance, you were to condemn a religion of human or animal sacrifices by virtue of your subjective sentiments, and if all the while a deity were really there demanding such sacrifices, you would be making a theoretical mistake by tacitly assuming that the deity must be non-existent; you would be setting up a theology of your own as much as if you were a scholastic philosopher.

 

To this extent, to the extent of disbelieving peremptorily in certain types of deity, I frankly confess that we must be theologians.  If disbeliefs can be said to constitute a theology, then the prejudices, instincts, and common sense which I chose as our guides make theological partisans of us whenever they make certain beliefs abhorrent.

 

But such common-sense prejudices and instincts are themselves the fruit of an empirical evolution.  Nothing is more striking than the secular alteration that goes on in the moral and religious tone of men, as their insight into nature and their social arrangements progressively develop.  After an interval of a few generations the mental climate proves unfavorable to notions of the deity which at an earlier date were perfectly satisfactory:  the older gods have fallen below the common secular level, and can no longer be believed in.  Today a deity who should require bleeding sacrifices to placate him would be too sanguinary to be taken seriously.  Even if powerful historical credentials were put forward in his favor, we would not look at them.  Once, on the contrary, his cruel appetites were of themselves credentials.

 

They positively recommended him to men's imaginations in ages when such coarse signs of power were respected and no others could be understood.  Such deities then were worshiped because such fruits were relished.

 

Doubtless historic accidents always played some later part, but the original factor in fixing the figure of the gods must always have been psychological.  The deity to whom the prophets, seers, and devotees who founded the particular cult bore witness was worth something to them personally. They could use him.  He guided their imagination, warranted their hopes, and controlled their will--or else they required him as a safeguard against the demon and a curber of other people's crimes.  In any case, they chose him for the value of the fruits he seemed to them to yield.

 

So soon as the fruits began to seem quite worthless; so soon as they conflicted with indispensable human ideals, or thwarted too extensively other values; so soon as they appeared childish, contemptible, or immoral when reflected on, the deity grew discredited, and was erelong neglected and forgotten.  It was in this way that the Greek and Roman gods ceased to be believed in by educated pagans; it is thus that we ourselves judge of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Mohammedan theologies; Protestants have so dealt with the Catholic notions of deity, and liberal Protestants with older Protestant notions; it is thus that Chinamen judge of us, and that all of us now living will be judged by our descendants.  When we cease to admire or approve what the definition of a deity implies, we end by deeming that deity incredible.

 

Few historic changes are more curious than these mutations of theological opinion.  The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our own forefathers that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their deity seems positively to have been required by their imagination.  They called the cruelty "retributive justice," and a God without it would certainly have struck them as not "sovereign" enough.  But today we abhor the very notion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary dealing-out of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could persuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a "delightful conviction," as of a doctrine "exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet," appears to us, if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean.  Not only the cruelty, but the paltriness of character of the gods believed in by earlier centuries also strikes later centuries with surprise.  We shall see examples of it from the annals of Catholic saintship which makes us rub our Protestant eyes.  Ritual worship in general appears to the modern transcendentalist, as well as to the ultra-puritanic type of mind, as if addressed to a deity of an almost absurdly childish character, taking delight in toy-shop furniture, tapers and tinsel, costume and mumbling and mummery, and finding his "glory" incomprehensibly enhanced thereby:--just as on the other hand the formless spaciousness of pantheism appears quite empty to ritualistic natures, and the gaunt theism of evangelical sects seems intolerably bald and chalky and bleak.

 

Luther, says Emerson, would have cut off his right hand rather than nail his theses to the door at Wittenberg, if he had supposed that they were destined to lead to the pale negations of Boston Unitarianism.

 

So far, then, although we are compelled, whatever may be our pretensions to empiricism, to employ some sort of a standard of theological probability of our own whenever we assume to estimate the fruits of other men's religion, yet this very standard has been begotten out of the drift of common life.  It is the voice of human experience within us, judging and condemning all gods that stand athwart the pathway along which it feels itself to be advancing.  Experience, if we take it in the largest sense, is thus the parent of those disbeliefs which, it was charged, were inconsistent with the experiential method.  The inconsistency, you see, is immaterial, and the charge may be neglected.

 

If we pass from disbeliefs to positive beliefs, it seems to me that there is not even a formal inconsistency to be laid against our method.  The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another. What I then propose to do is, briefly stated, to test saintliness by common sense, to use human standards to help us decide how far the religious life commends itself as an ideal kind of human activity.  If it commends itself, then any theological beliefs that may inspire it, in so far forth will stand accredited.  If not, then they will be discredited, and all without reference to anything but human working principles.  It is but the elimination of the humanly unfit, and the survival of the humanly fittest, applied to religious beliefs; and if we look at history candidly and without prejudice, we have to admit that no religion has ever in the long run established or proved itself in any other way.  Religions have APPROVED themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning.  When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.

 

The needs were always many, and the tests were never sharp.  So the reproach of vagueness and subjectivity and "on the whole"-ness, which can with perfect legitimacy be addressed to the empirical method as we are forced to use it, is after all a reproach to which the entire life of man in dealing with these matters is obnoxious.  No religion has ever yet owed its prevalence to "apodictic certainty."    In a later lecture I will ask whether objective certainty can ever be added by theological reasoning to a religion that already empirically prevails.

 

One word, also, about the reproach that in following this sort of an empirical method we are handing ourselves over to systematic skepticism.

 

Since it is impossible to deny secular alterations in our sentiments and needs, it would be absurd to affirm that one's own age of the world can be beyond correction by the next age.  Skepticism cannot, therefore, be ruled out by any set of thinkers as a possibility against which their conclusions are secure; and no empiricist ought to claim exemption from this universal liability.  But to admit one's liability to correction is one thing, and to embark upon a sea of wanton doubt is another.  Of willfully playing into the hands of skepticism we cannot be accused.  He who acknowledges the imperfectness of his instrument, and makes allowance <326> for it in discussing his observations, is in a much better position for gaining truth than if he claimed his instrument to be infallible.  Or is dogmatic or scholastic theology less doubted in point of fact for claiming, as it does, to be in point of right undoubtable?  And if not, what command over truth would this kind of theology really lose if, instead of absolute certainty, she only claimed reasonable probability for her conclusions?  If WE claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp. Pretty surely it will be more than we could have had, if we were unconscious of our liability to err.

 

Nevertheless, dogmatism will doubtless continue to condemn us for this confession.  The mere outward form of inalterable certainty is so precious to some minds that to renounce it explicitly is for them out of the question.  They will claim it even where the facts most patently pronounce its folly.  But the safe thing is surely to recognize that all the insights of creatures of a day like ourselves must be provisional. The wisest of critics is an altering being, subject to the better insight of the morrow, and right at any moment, only "up to date" and "on the whole."    When larger ranges of truth open, it is surely best to be able to open ourselves to their reception, unfettered by our previous pretensions. "Heartily know, when half-gods go, the gods arrive."

 

The fact of diverse judgments about religious phenomena is therefore entirely unescapable, whatever may be one's own desire to attain the irreversible.  But apart from that fact, a more fundamental question awaits us, the question whether men's opinions ought to be expected to be absolutely uniform in this field.  Ought all men to have the same religion? Ought they to approve the same fruits and follow the same leadings?  Are they so like in their inner needs that, for hard and soft, for proud and humble, for strenuous and lazy, for healthy-minded and despairing, exactly the same religious incentives are required?  Or are different functions in the organism of humanity allotted to different types of man, so that some may really be the better for a religion of consolation and reassurance, whilst others are better for one of terror and reproof?  It might conceivably be so; and we shall, I think, more and more suspect it to be so as we go on. And if it be so, how can any possible judge or critic help being biased in favor of the religion by which his own needs are best met?  He aspires to impartiality; but he is too close to the struggle not to be to some degree a participant, and he is sure to approve most warmly those fruits of piety in others which taste most good and prove most nourishing to HIM.

 

I am well aware of how anarchic much of what I say may sound.  Expressing myself thus abstractly and briefly, I may seem to despair of the very notion of truth.  But I beseech you to reserve your judgment until we see it applied to the details which lie before us.  I do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable truth about such matters of fact as those with which religions deal.  But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight in intellectual instability.  I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such.  Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.  That we can gain more and more of it by moving always in the right direction, I believe as much as any one, and I hope to bring you all to my way of thinking before the termination of these lectures.  Till then, do not, I pray you, harden your minds irrevocably against the empiricism which I profess.

 

I will waste no more words, then, in abstract justification of my method, but seek immediately to use it upon the facts.

 

In critically judging of the value of religious phenomena, it is very important to insist on the distinction between religion as an individual personal function, and religion as an institutional, corporate, or tribal product.  I drew this distinction, you may remember, in my second lecture.  The word "religion," as ordinarily used, is equivocal.  A survey of history shows us that, as a rule, religious geniuses attract disciples, and produce groups of sympathizers.  When these groups get strong enough to "organize" themselves, they become ecclesiastical institutions with corporate ambitions of their own.  The spirit of politics and the lust of dogmatic rule are then apt to enter and to contaminate the originally innocent thing; so that when we hear the word "religion" nowadays, we think inevitably of some "church" or other; and to some persons the word "church" suggests so much hypocrisy and tyranny and meanness and tenacity of superstition that in a wholesale undiscerning way they glory in saying that they are "down" on religion altogether.  Even we who belong to churches do not exempt other churches than our own from the general condemnation.

 

But in this course of lectures ecclesiastical institutions hardly concern us at all.  The religious experience which we are studying is that which lives itself out within the private breast.  First-hand individual experience of this kind has always appeared as a heretical sort of innovation to those who witnessed its birth.  Naked comes it into the world and lonely; and it has always, for a time at least, driven him who had it into the wilderness, often into the literal wilderness out of doors, where the Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, St. Francis, George Fox, and so many others had to go.  George Fox expresses well this isolation; and I can do no better at this point than read to you a page from his Journal, referring to the period of his youth when religion began to ferment within him seriously.

 

"I fasted much," Fox says, "walked abroad in solitary places many days, and often took my Bible, and sat in hollow trees and lonesome places until night came on; and frequently in the night walked mournfully about by myself; for I was a man of sorrows in the time of the first workings of the Lord in me.

 

"During all this time I was never joined in profession of religion with any, but gave up myself to the Lord, having forsaken all evil company, taking leave of father and mother, and all other relations, and traveled up and down as a stranger on the earth, which way the Lord inclined my heart; taking a chamber to myself in the town where I came, and tarrying sometimes more, sometimes less in a place:  for I durst not stay long in a place, being afraid both of professor and profane, lest, being a tender young man, I should be hurt by conversing much with either.  For which reason I kept much as a stranger, seeking heavenly wisdom and getting knowledge from the Lord; and was brought off from outward things, to rely on the Lord alone.  As I had forsaken the priests, so I left the separate preachers also, and those called the most experienced people; for I saw there was none among them all that could speak to my condition.  And when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do; then, oh then, I heard a voice which said, 'There is one, even Jesus Christ, that can speak to thy condition.'  When I heard it, my heart did leap for joy.  Then the Lord let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak to my condition. I had not fellowship with any people, priests, nor professors, nor any sort of separated people.  I was afraid of all carnal talk and talkers, for I could see nothing but corruptions.  When I was in the deep, under all shut up, I could not believe that I should ever overcome; my troubles, my sorrows, and my temptations were so great that I often thought I should have despaired, I was so tempted.  But when Christ opened to me how he was tempted by the same devil, and had overcome him, and had bruised his head; and that through him and his power, life, grace, and spirit, I should overcome also, I had confidence in him.  If I had had a king's diet, palace, and attendance, all would have been as nothing, for nothing gave me comfort but the Lord by his power.  I saw professors, priests, and people were whole and at ease in that condition which was my misery, and they loved that which I would have been rid of.  But the Lord did stay my desires upon himself, and my care was cast upon him alone."[198]

 

[198] George Fox:  Journal, Philadelphia, 1800, pp. 59-61, abridged.

 

 

 

A genuine first-hand religious experience like this is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman.  If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy.  But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over:  the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn.  The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which in purer days it drew its own supply of inspiration. Unless, indeed, by adopting new movements of the spirit it can make capital out of them and use them for its selfish corporate designs! Of protective action of this politic sort, promptly or tardily decided on, the dealings of the Roman ecclesiasticism with many individual saints and prophets yield examples enough for our instruction.

 

The plain fact is that men's minds are built, as has been often said, in water-tight compartments.  Religious after a fashion, they yet have many other things in them beside their religion, and unholy entanglements and associations inevitably obtain.  The basenesses so commonly charged to religion's account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable at all to religion proper, but rather to religion's wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion.  And the bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeable to religion's wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic dominion, the passion for laying down the law in the form of an absolutely closed-in theoretic system.  The ecclesiastical spirit in general is the sum of these two spirits of dominion; and I beseech you never to confound the phenomena of mere tribal or corporate psychology which it presents with those manifestations of the purely interior life which are the exclusive object of our study.  The baiting of Jews, the hunting of Albigenses and Waldenses, the stoning of Quakers and ducking of Methodists, the murdering of Mormons and the massacring of Armenians, express much rather that aboriginal human neophobia, that pugnacity of which we all share the vestiges, and that inborn hatred of the alien and of eccentric and non-conforming men as aliens, than they express the positive piety of the various perpetrators.  Piety is the mask, the inner force is tribal instinct.  You believe as little as I do, in spite of the Christian unction with which the German emperor addressed his troops upon their way to China, that the conduct which he suggested, and in which other Christian armies went beyond them, had anything whatever to do with the interior religious life of those concerned in the performance.

 

Well, no more for past atrocities than for this atrocity should we make piety responsible.  At most we may blame piety for not availing to check our natural passions, and sometimes for supplying them with hypocritical pretexts. But hypocrisy also imposes obligations, and with the pretext usually couples some restriction; and when the passion gust is over, the piety may bring a reaction of repentance which the irreligious natural man would not have shown.

 

For many of the historic aberrations which have been laid to her charge, religion as such, then, is not to blame.  Yet of the charge that over-zealousness or fanaticism is one of her liabilities we cannot wholly acquit her, so I will next make a remark upon that point.  But I will preface it by a preliminary remark which connects itself with much that follows.   Our survey of the phenomena of saintliness has unquestionably produced in your minds an impression of extravagance. Is it necessary, some of you have asked, as one example after another came before us, to be quite so fantastically good as that?  We who have no vocation for the extremer ranges of sanctity will surely be let off at the last day if our humility, asceticism, and devoutness prove of a less convulsive sort.  This practically amounts to saying that much that it is legitimate to admire in this field need nevertheless not be imitated, and that religious phenomena, like all other human phenomena, are subject to the law of the golden mean.  Political reformers accomplish their successive tasks in the history of nations by being blind for the time to other causes.  Great schools of art work out the effects which it is their mission to reveal, at the cost of a one-sidedness for which other schools must make amends.  We accept a John Howard, a Mazzini, a Botticelli, a Michael Angelo, with a kind of indulgence.  We are glad they existed to show us that way, but we are glad there are also other ways of seeing and taking life.  So of many of the saints whom we have looked at.  We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example.  The conduct we blame ourselves for not following lies nearer to the middle line of human effort. It is less dependent on particular beliefs and doctrines.  It is such as wears well in different ages, such as under different skies all judges are able to commend.

 

The fruits of religion, in other words, are, like all human products, liable to corruption by excess.  Common sense must judge them.  It need not blame the votary; but it may be able to praise him only conditionally, as one who acts faithfully according to his lights.  He shows us heroism in one way, but the unconditionally good way is that for which no indulgence need be asked.   We find that error by excess is exemplified by every saintly virtue.  Excess, in human faculties, means usually one-sidedness or want of balance; for it is hard to imagine an essential faculty too strong, if only other faculties equally strong be there to cooperate with it in action.  Strong affections need a strong will; strong active powers need a strong intellect; strong intellect needs strong sympathies, to keep life steady.  If the balance exist, no one faculty can possibly be too strong--we only get the stronger all-round character.  In the life of saints, technically so called, the spiritual faculties are strong, but what gives the impression of extravagance proves usually on examination to be a relative deficiency of intellect.  Spiritual excitement takes pathological forms whenever other interests are too few and the intellect too narrow.  We find this exemplified by all the saintly attributes in turn--devout love of God, purity, charity, asceticism, all may lead astray.  I will run over these virtues in succession.

 

First of all let us take Devoutness.  When unbalanced, one of its vices is called Fanaticism.  Fanaticism (when not a mere expression of ecclesiastical ambition) is only loyalty carried to a convulsive extreme.  When an intensely loyal and narrow mind is once grasped by the feeling that a certain superhuman person is worthy of its exclusive devotion, one of the first things that happens is that it idealizes the devotion itself.  To adequately realize the merits of the idol gets to be considered the one great merit of the worshiper; and the sacrifices and servilities by which savage tribesmen have from time immemorial exhibited their faithfulness to chieftains are now outbid in favor of the deity.  Vocabularies are exhausted and languages altered in the attempt to praise him enough; death is looked on as gain if it attract his grateful notice; and the personal attitude of being his devotee becomes what one might almost call a new and exalted kind of professional specialty within the tribe.[199] The legends that gather round the lives of holy persons are fruits of this impulse to celebrate and glorify.  The Buddha[200] and Mohammed[201] and their companions and many Christian saints are incrusted with a heavy jewelry of anecdotes which are meant to be honorific, but are simply abgeschmackt and silly, and form a touching expression of man's misguided propensity to praise.

 

[199] Christian saints have had their specialties of devotion, Saint Francis to Christ's wounds; Saint Anthony of Padua to Christ's childhood; Saint Bernard to his humanity; Saint Teresa to Saint Joseph, etc.  The Shi-ite Mohammedans venerate Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law, instead of Abu-bekr, his brother-in-law.  Vambery describes a dervish whom he met in Persia, "who had solemnly vowed, thirty years before, that he would never employ his organs of speech otherwise but in uttering, everlastingly, the name of his favorite, Ali, Ali.  He thus wished to signify to the world that he was the most devoted partisan of that Ali who had been dead a thousand years.  In his own home, speaking with his wife, children, and friends, no other word but 'Ali!' ever passed his lips.  If he wanted food or drink or anything else, he expressed his wants still by repeating 'Ali!'  Begging or buying at the bazaar, it was always 'Ali!'  Treated ill or generously, he would still harp on his monotonous 'Ali!'  Latterly his zeal assumed such tremendous proportions that, like a madman, he would race, the whole day, up and down the streets of the town, throwing his stick high up into the air, and shriek our, all the while, at the top of his voice, 'Ali!'  This dervish was venerated by everybody as a saint, and received everywhere with the greatest distinction."  Arminius Vambery, his Life and Adventures, written by Himself, London, 1889, p. 69.  On the anniversary of the death of Hussein, Ali's son, the Shi-ite Moslems still make the air resound with cries of his name and Ali's.

 

[200] Compare H. C. Warren:  Buddhism in Translation, Cambridge, U.S., 1898, passim.

 

[201] Compare J. L. Merrick:  The Life and Religion of Mohammed, as contained in the Sheeah traditions of the Hyat-ul-Kuloob, Boston. 1850, passim.

 

 

 

An immediate consequence of this condition of mind is jealousy for the deity's honor.  How can the devotee show his loyalty better than by sensitiveness in this regard?  The slightest affront or neglect must be resented, the deity's enemies must be put to shame.  In exceedingly narrow minds and active wills, such a care may become an engrossing preoccupation; and crusades have been preached and massacres instigated for no other reason than to remove a fancied slight upon the God.  Theologies representing the gods as mindful of their glory, and churches with imperialistic policies, have conspired to fan this temper to a glow, so that intolerance and persecution have come to be vices associated by some of us inseparably with the saintly mind. They are unquestionably its besetting sins.  The saintly temper is a moral temper, and a moral temper has often to be cruel.  It is a partisan temper, and that is cruel.  Between his own and Jehovah's enemies a David knows no difference; a Catherine of Siena, panting to stop the warfare among Christians which was the scandal of her epoch, can think of no better method of union among them than a crusade to massacre the Turks; Luther finds no word of protest or regret over the atrocious tortures with which the Anabaptist leaders were put to death; and a Cromwell praises the Lord for delivering his enemies into his hands for "execution."  Politics come in in all such cases; but piety finds the partnership not quite unnatural.  So, when "freethinkers" tell us that religion and fanaticism are twins, we cannot make an unqualified denial of the charge.

 

Fanaticism must then be inscribed on the wrong side of religion's account, so long as the religious person's intellect is on the stage which the despotic kind of God satisfies.  But as soon as the God is represented as less intent on his own honor and glory, it ceases to be a danger.

 

Fanaticism is found only where the character is masterful and aggressive.  In gentle characters, where devoutness is intense and the intellect feeble, we have an imaginative absorption in the love of God to the exclusion of all practical human interests, which, though innocent enough, is too one-sided to be admirable.  A mind too narrow has room but for one kind of affection.  When the love of God takes possession of such a mind, it expels all human loves and human uses.  There is no English name for such a sweet excess of devotion, so I will refer to it as a theopathic condition.

 

The blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque may serve as an example.

 

"To be loved here upon the earth," her recent biographer exclaims:  "to be loved by a noble, elevated, distinguished being; to be loved with fidelity, with devotion--what enchantment! But to be loved by God! and loved by him to distraction [aime jusqu'a la folie]!--Margaret melted away with love at the thought of such a thing.  Like Saint Philip of Neri in former times, or like Saint Francis Xavier, she said to God:  'Hold back, O my God, these torrents which overwhelm me, or else enlarge my capacity for their reception."[202]

 

[202] Bougaud:  Hist. de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894, p. 145.

 

 

 

The most signal proofs of God's love which Margaret Mary received were her hallucinations of sight, touch, and hearing, and the most signal in turn of these were the revelations of Christ's sacred heart, "surrounded with rays more brilliant than the Sun, and transparent like a crystal.  The wound which he received on the cross visibly appeared upon it.  There was a crown of thorns round about this divine Heart, and a cross above it."  At the same time Christ's voice told her that, unable longer to contain the flames of his love for mankind, he had chosen her by a miracle to spread the knowledge of them.  He thereupon took out her mortal heart, placed it inside of his own and inflamed it, and then replaced it in her breast, adding:  "Hitherto thou hast taken the name of my slave, hereafter thou shalt be called the well-beloved disciple of my Sacred Heart."

 

In a later vision the Saviour revealed to her in detail the "great design" which he wished to establish through her instrumentality.  "I ask of thee to bring it about that every first Friday after the week of holy Sacrament shall be made into a special holy day for honoring my Heart by a general communion and by services intended to make honorable amends for the indignities which it has received.  And I promise thee that my Heart will dilate to shed with abundance the influences of its love upon all those who pay to it these honors, or who bring it about that others do the same."

 

"This revelation," says Mgr. Bougaud, "is unquestionably the most important of all the revelations which have illumined the Church since that of the Incarnation and of the Lord's Supper. . . .  After the Eucharist, the supreme effort of the Sacred Heart."[203]  Well, what were its good fruits for Margaret Mary's life?  Apparently little else but sufferings and prayers and absences of mind and swoons and ecstasies.  She became increasingly useless about the convent, her absorption in Christ's love--

 

"which grew upon her daily, rendering her more and more incapable of attending to external duties.  They tried her in the infirmary, but without much success, although her kindness, zeal, and devotion were without bounds, and her charity rose to acts of such a heroism that our readers would not bear the recital of them.  They tried her in the kitchen, but were forced to give it up as hopeless--everything dropped out of her hands.  The admirable humility with which she made amends for her clumsiness could not prevent this from being prejudicial to the order and regularity which must always reign in a community. They put her in the school, where the little girls cherished her, and cut pieces out of her clothes [for relics] as if she were already a saint, but where she was too absorbed inwardly to pay the necessary attention.  Poor dear sister, even less after her visions than before them was she a denizen of earth, and they had to leave her in her heaven."[204]

 

[203] Bougaud:  Hist. de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894, pp. 365, 241.

 

[204] Bougaud:  Op. cit., p. 267.

 

 

 

Poor dear sister, indeed! Amiable and good, but so feeble of intellectual outlook that it would be too much to ask of us, with our Protestant and modern education, to feel anything but indulgent pity for the kind of saintship which she embodies.  A lower example still of theopathic saintliness is that of Saint Gertrude, a Benedictine nun of the thirteenth century, whose "Revelations," a well-known mystical authority, consist mainly of proofs of Christ's partiality for her undeserving person.  Assurances of his love, intimacies and caresses and compliments of the most absurd and puerile sort, addressed by Christ to Gertrude as an individual, form the tissue of this paltry-minded recital.[205] In reading such a narrative, we realize the gap between the thirteenth and the twentieth century, and we feel that saintliness of character may yield almost absolutely worthless fruits if it be associated with such inferior intellectual sympathies.  What with science, idealism, and democracy, our own imagination has grown to need a God of an entirely different temperament from that Being interested exclusively in dealing out personal favors, with whom our ancestors were so contented.  Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness; and even the best professional sainthood of former centuries, pent in as it is to such a conception, seems to us curiously shallow and unedifying.

 

[205] Examples:  "Suffering from a headache, she sought, for the glory of God, to relieve herself by holding certain odoriferous substances in her mouth, when the Lord appeared to her to lean over towards her lovingly, and to find comfort Himself in these odors.  After having gently breathed them in, He arose, and said with a gratified air to the Saints, as if contented with what He had done: 'see the new present which my betrothed has given Me!'

 

"One day, at chapel, she heard supernaturally sung the words 'Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus.' The son of God leaning towards her like a sweet lover, and giving to her soul the softest kiss, said to her at the second Sanctus:  'In this Sanctus addressed to my person, receive with this kiss all the sanctity of my divinity and of my humanity, and let it be to thee a sufficient preparation for approaching the communion table.' And the next following Sunday, while she was thanking God for this favor, behold the Son of God, more beauteous than thousands of angels, takes her in His arms as if He were proud of her and presents her to God the Father, in that perfection of sanctity with which He had dowered her.  And the Father took such delight in this soul thus presented by His only son, that, as if unable longer to restrain Himself, He gave her, and the Holy Ghost gave her also, the sanctity attributed to each by His own Sanctus--and thus she remained endowed with the plenary fullness of the blessing of Sanctity, bestowed on her by Omnipotence, by Wisdom, and by Love."  Revelations de Sainte Gertrude, Paris, 1898, i. 44, 186.

 

 

 

Take Saint Teresa, for example, one of the ablest women, in many respects, of whose life we have the record.  She had a powerful intellect of the practical order.  She wrote admirable descriptive psychology, possessed a will equal to any emergency, great talent for politics and business, a buoyant disposition, and a first-rate literary style.  She was tenaciously aspiring, and put her whole life at the service of her religious ideals.  Yet so paltry were these, according to our present way of thinking, that (although I know that others have been moved differently) I confess that my only feeling in reading her has been pity that so much vitality of soul should have found such poor employment.

 

In spite of the sufferings which she endured, there is a curious flavor of superficiality about her genius.  A Birmingham anthropologist, Dr. Jordan, has divided the human race into two types, whom he calls "shrews" and "nonshrews" respectively.[206] The shrew-type is defined as possessing an "active unimpassioned temperament."  In other words, shrews are the "motors," rather than the "sensories,"[207] and their expressions are as a rule more energetic than the feelings which appear to prompt them.  Saint Teresa, paradoxical as such a judgment may sound, was a typical shrew, in this sense of the term.  The bustle of her style, as well as of her life, proves it.  Not only must she receive unheard-of personal favors and spiritual graces from her Saviour, but she must immediately write about them and exploiter them professionally, and use her expertness to give instruction to those less privileged.  Her voluble egotism; her sense, not of radical bad being, as the really contrite have it, but of her "faults" and "imperfections" in the plural; her stereotyped humility and return upon herself, as covered with "confusion" at each new manifestation of God's singular partiality for a person so unworthy, are typical of shrewdom:  a paramountly feeling nature would be objectively lost in gratitude, and silent.  She had some public instincts, it is true; she hated the Lutherans, and longed for the church's triumph over them; but in the main her idea of religion seems to have been that of an endless amatory flirtation--if one may say so without irreverence-- between the devotee and the deity; and apart from helping younger nuns to go in this direction by the inspiration of her example and instruction, there is absolutely no human use in her, or sign of any general human interest.  Yet the spirit of her age, far from rebuking her, exalted her as superhuman.

 

[206]  Furneaux Jordan:  Character in Birth and Parentage, first edition. Later editions change the nomenclature.

 

[207] As to this distinction, see the admirably practical account in J. M. Baldwin's little book, The Story of the Mind, 1898.

 

 

 

We have to pass a similar judgment on the whole notion of saintship based on merits.  Any God who, on the one hand, can care to keep a pedantically minute account of individual shortcomings, and on the other can feel such partialities, and load particular creatures with such insipid marks of favor, is too small-minded a God for our credence.  When Luther, in his immense manly way, swept off by a stroke of his hand the very notion of a debit and credit account kept with individuals by the Almighty, he stretched the soul's imagination and saved theology from puerility.   So much for mere devotion, divorced from the intellectual conceptions which might guide it towards bearing useful human fruit.

 

The next saintly virtue in which we find excess is Purity.  In theopathic characters, like those whom we have just considered, the love of God must not be mixed with any other love.  Father and mother, sisters, brothers, and friends are felt as interfering distractions; for sensitiveness and narrowness, when they occur together, as they often do, require above all things a simplified world to dwell in.  Variety and confusion are too much for their powers of comfortable adaptation.  But whereas your aggressive pietist reaches his unity objectively, by forcibly stamping disorder and divergence out, your retiring pietist reaches his subjectively, leaving disorder in the world at large, but making a smaller world in which he dwells himself and from which he eliminates it altogether.  Thus, alongside of the church militant with its prisons, dragonnades, and inquisition methods, we have the church fugient, as one might call it, with its hermitages, monasteries, and sectarian organizations, both churches pursuing the same object--to unify the life,[208] and simplify the spectacle presented to the soul.  A mind extremely sensitive to inner discords will drop one external relation after another, as interfering with the absorption of consciousness in spiritual things.  Amusements mus