The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human NatureJames, William
ReligionComparative
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
James, William
Conversion; Experience (Religion); Philosophy and religion; Psychology, Religious; Religion
As I interpret his melancholy, then, it was not merely an accidental
vitiation of his humors, though it was doubtless also that. It was
logically called for by the clash between his inner character and his
outer activities and aims. Although a literary artist, Tolstoy was one of
those primitive oaks of men to whom the superfluities and insincerities,
the cupidities, complications, and cruelties of our polite civilization
are profoundly unsatisfying, and for whom the eternal veracities lie with
more natural and animal things. His crisis was the getting of his soul in
order, the discovery of its genuine habitat and vocation, the escape from
falsehoods into what for him were ways of truth. It was a case of
heterogeneous personality tardily and slowly finding its unity and level.
And though not many of us can imitate Tolstoy, not having enough, perhaps,
of the aboriginal human marrow in our bones, most of us may at least feel
as if it might be better for us if we could.
Bunyan’s recovery seems to have been even slower. For years together he
was alternately haunted with texts of Scripture, now up and now down, but
at last with an ever growing relief in his salvation through the blood of
Christ.
“My peace would be in and out twenty times a day; comfort now and
trouble presently; peace now and before I could go a furlong as
full of guilt and fear as ever heart could hold.” When a good text
comes home to him, “This,” he writes, “gave me good encouragement
for the space of two or three hours”; or “This was a good day to
me, I hope I shall not forget it”; or “The glory of these words
was then so weighty on me that I was ready to swoon as I sat; yet
not with grief and trouble, but with solid joy and peace”; or
“This made a strange seizure on my spirit; it brought light with
it, and commanded a silence in my heart of all those tumultuous
thoughts that before did use, like masterless hell‐hounds, to roar
and bellow and make a hideous noise within me. It showed me that
Jesus Christ had not quite forsaken and cast off my Soul.”
Such periods accumulate until he can write: “And now remained only
the hinder part of the tempest, for the thunder was gone beyond
me, only some drops would still remain, that now and then would
fall upon me”;—and at last: “Now did my chains fall off my legs
indeed; I was loosed from my afflictions and irons; my temptations
also fled away; so that from that time, those dreadful Scriptures
of God left off to trouble me; now went I also home rejoicing, for
the grace and love of God.... Now could I see myself in Heaven and
Earth at once; in Heaven by my Christ, by my Head, by my
Righteousness and Life, though on Earth by my body or person....
Christ was a precious Christ to my soul that night; I could scarce
lie in my bed for joy and peace and triumph through Christ.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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