It is interesting to notice that it is exactly this true psychological attitude concerning the emotional life that Phillips Brooks believed that he found perfectly reflected in Jesus. "The sensitiveness of Jesus to pain and joy," he says, "never leads him for a moment to try to be sad or happy with direct endeavor; nor, is there any sign that he ever judges the real character of himself or any other man by the sadness or the happiness that for the moment covers his life. He simply lives, and joy and sorrow issue from his living, and cast their brightness and their gloominess back upon his life; but there is no sorrow and no joy that he ever sought for itself, and he always kept a self-knowledge underneath the joy or sorrow, undisturbed by the moment's happiness or unhappiness."[42] How far from this objectivity and this healthful emotional life is the atmosphere of most of our devotional books, and, one might say, of all the manuals of ordinary mysticism! That this difficulty should confront us in devotional literature is very natural; for such writing commonly aims to give the emotional sense of reality in religion; and is, therefore, particularly under the temptation to show and to produce a straining after the emotion, as for its own sake. Moreover, the very introspection, almost inevitably involved in the reading and writing of devotional books, tends to bring about an artificial change in the religious experience, and so to introduce into it the abnormal. But the social consciousness, so far as it affects religion, not only tends to draw away from the falsely mystical, and to emphasize the personal, and so to keep the truly mystical, but it is even more plain that it must tend to insist upon the ethical in religion. [35] Cf. King, _Reconstruction in Theology_, p. 201 ff. [36] _Op. cit._, pp. 210 ff. [37] James, _Psychology_, Vol. II, p. 307. [38] James, _The Will to Believe_, pp. 294, 295. [39] _Psychology_, Briefer Course, p. 16. [40] Cf. James, _Psychology_, Vol. II, 633-677; especially 633, 634, 667, 671, 677; Münsterberg, _Psychology and Life_, pp. 23-28. [41] Brooks, _The Influence of Jesus_, p. 219. [42] _The Influence of Jesus_, p. 156. CHAPTER VII _THE THOROUGH ETHICIZING OF RELIGION_ I. THE PRESSURE OF THE PROBLEM