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
I said, ‘Dear Jesus, can you help me?’ Never with mortal tongue
can I describe that moment. Although up to that moment my soul had
been filled with indescribable gloom, I felt the glorious
brightness of the noonday sun shine into my heart. I felt I was a
free man. Oh, the precious feeling of safety, of freedom, of
resting on Jesus! I felt that Christ with all his brightness and
power had come into my life; that, indeed, old things had passed
away and all things had become new.
“From that moment till now I have never wanted a drink of whiskey,
and I have never seen money enough to make me take one. I promised
God that night that if he would take away the appetite for strong
drink, I would work for him all my life. He has done his part, and
I have been trying to do mine.”(104)
Dr. Leuba rightly remarks that there is little doctrinal theology in such
an experience, which starts with the absolute need of a higher helper, and
ends with the sense that he has helped us. He gives other cases of
drunkards’ conversions which are purely ethical, containing, as recorded,
no theological beliefs whatever. John B. Gough’s case, for instance, is
practically, says Dr. Leuba, the conversion of an atheist—neither God nor
Jesus being mentioned.(105) But in spite of the importance of this type of
regeneration, with little or no intellectual readjustment, this writer
surely makes it too exclusive. It corresponds to the subjectively centred
form of morbid melancholy, of which Bunyan and Alline were examples. But
we saw in our seventh lecture that there are objective forms of melancholy
also, in which the lack of rational meaning of the universe, and of life
anyhow, is the burden that weighs upon one—you remember Tolstoy’s
case.(106) So there are distinct elements in conversion, and their
relations to individual lives deserve to be discriminated.(107)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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