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
“Orthodox scholars say: ‘In the heathen classics you find no
consciousness of sin.’ It is very true—God be thanked for it. They
were conscious of wrath, of cruelty, avarice, drunkenness, lust,
sloth, cowardice, and other actual vices, and struggled and got
rid of the deformities, but they were not conscious of ‘enmity
against God,’ and didn’t sit down and whine and groan against non‐
existent evil. I have done wrong things enough in my life, and do
them now; I miss the mark, draw bow, and try again. But I am not
conscious of hating God, or man, or right, or love, and I know
there is much ‘health in me’; and in my body, even now, there
dwelleth many a good thing, spite of consumption and Saint Paul.”
In another letter Parker writes: “I have swum in clear sweet
waters all my days; and if sometimes they were a little cold, and
the stream ran adverse and something rough, it was never too
strong to be breasted and swum through. From the days of earliest
boyhood, when I went stumbling through the grass,... up to the
gray‐bearded manhood of this time, there is none but has left me
honey in the hive of memory that I now feed on for present
delight. When I recall the years ... I am filled with a sense of
sweetness and wonder that such little things can make a mortal so
exceedingly rich. But I must confess that the chiefest of all my
delights is still the religious.”
Another good expression of the “once‐born” type of consciousness,
developing straight and natural, with no element of morbid compunction or
crisis, is contained in the answer of Dr. Edward Everett Hale, the eminent
Unitarian preacher and writer, to one of Dr. Starbuck’s circulars. I quote
a part of it:—
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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