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
“God has two families of children on this earth,” says Francis W.
Newman,(33) “_the once‐born_ and _the twice‐born_,” and the once‐
born he describes as follows: “They see God, not as a strict
Judge, not as a Glorious Potentate; but as the animating Spirit of
a beautiful harmonious world, Beneficent and Kind, Merciful as
well as Pure. The same characters generally have no metaphysical
tendencies: they do not look back into themselves. Hence they are
not distressed by their own imperfections: yet it would be absurd
to call them self‐righteous; for they hardly think of themselves
_at all_. This childlike quality of their nature makes the opening
of religion very happy to them: for they no more shrink from God,
than a child from an emperor, before whom the parent trembles: in
fact, they have no vivid conception of _any_ of the qualities in
which the severer Majesty of God consists.(34) He is to them the
impersonation of Kindness and Beauty. They read his character, not
in the disordered world of man, but in romantic and harmonious
nature. Of human sin they know perhaps little in their own hearts
and not very much in the world; and human suffering does but melt
them to tenderness. Thus, when they approach God, no inward
disturbance ensues; and without being as yet spiritual, they have
a certain complacency and perhaps romantic sense of excitement in
their simple worship.”
In the Romish Church such characters find a more congenial soil to grow in
than in Protestantism, whose fashions of feeling have been set by minds of
a decidedly pessimistic order. But even in Protestantism they have been
abundant enough; and in its recent “liberal” developments of Unitarianism
and latitudinarianism generally, minds of this order have played and still
are playing leading and constructive parts. Emerson himself is an
admirable example. Theodore Parker is another,—here are a couple of
characteristic passages from Parker’s correspondence.(35)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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