The Christian Faith Under Modern Searchlights Part 6

The psychologists have emphasized not only the facts of conversion but the variety in its mode. It has been pointed out that "conversion for males is a more violent incident than for females, and more sudden."[100]

Uhlhorn has observed that it is characteristic of a period of conflict "that sudden conversions are more frequent then than at other times, that the marvel inherent in every conversion becomes more evident, and, so to speak, more palpable."[101] A child brought up under strong religious influences will not have the intense struggles which are natural when a hardened criminal or a scoffing unbeliever is converted.

Count Zinzendorf raised serious misgivings in the minds of the Moravians when he insisted that he "could not tell the day when he first decided for Christ, and had no knowledge of a time when he did not love Him."[102] The mother of Edmund Gosse, a woman singularly devoted in her labours by tongue and pen to the cause of evangelical religion, wrote in her thirtieth year: "I cannot recollect the time I did not love religion. If I must date my conversion from my first wish and trial to be holy, I may go back to infancy; if I am to postpone it till after my last willful sin, it is scarcely yet begun."[103]

100: Starbuck: "Psychology of Religion," p. 95.

101: "Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism," p. 168.

102: See Stevens: "Psychology of the Christian Soul," pp. 159, 160.

103: "Father and Son," by Edmund Gosse, 1907, p. 3.

It would be equally one-sided to insist that all conversions must be of the sudden or cataclysmic type, and to ignore the tremendous significance of some sudden and dramatic experiences of conversion. Paul and Augustine are cases in point, and it will scarcely do to dismiss them with the remark that "Paul was probably a neurotic, and that Augustine was a sensualist with a highly developed nervous temperament."[104] The true nature of conversion may best be seen, as James suggests, in those experiences which are exaggerated and intense.[105]

104: Ames: "The Psychology of Religious Experience," p. 265.

105: "Varieties," p. 45.

Conversions of the sudden and dramatic type have, as a matter of fact, exerted the most far-reaching influence in history. The secular historian is apt nowadays to magnify the influence of Paul upon the life of Europe, but the church historian must add that Paul, as apostle or theologian or missionary, cannot be understood apart from the experience at Damascus. Augustine's conversion inspired his thought and determined his theology. Of Luther, whose conversion may not have been of quite so dramatic a type, a recent writer says: "Indeed, the Reformation in Germany was the spiritual biography of Luther writ large, a spiritual experience materialized in inst.i.tutions and intellectualized in confessions."[106]

106: H. H. Walker: _Harvard Theological Review_, April, 1913, p. 179.

The psychologists unite with the historians in describing the broad objective effects of religion upon the field of history. Christianity in its Pauline form presented, in the West, a successful obstacle to the flood of Eastern thought and culture. When the structure of the Roman Empire was crumbling, it was Christianity in its Roman organization that resisted the disintegrating influences of the barbarian invasion. It was Christianity in its Calvinistic form that became "the seed-plot of modern democracy." "No student of American history," says a writer on the psychology of religion, "can fail to recognize the immense value of religion as a factor in our national development, keeping us in some measure true to the ideals of our fathers.... The fact that our moral conceptions have at all stood the strain of this rapid material development, and that political and social corruption and decay in America to-day are not hopeless and irremediable as they were in Rome during the last century of the Republic, is due, I believe, chiefly to the vitality of religion among us as a factor effectively conservative of our socially recognized values."[107]

107: W. K. Wright: "A Psychological Definition of Religion,"

_American Journal of Theology_, July, 1912, p. 406.

3. At a time when the sense of sin is declining, it is interesting to find the psychologists pressing upon our attention the facts of the disorder, the wrongness, the uneasiness, or frankly the need of salvation, of human kind. It would be out of place for the psychologist, as such, to dogmatize upon the subject of original sin, but in his a.n.a.lysis of human nature he cannot overlook the fact of moral discord, a fact often politely ignored in the text-books on ethics. Thus when James speaks unreservedly and autobiographically, he confesses that "we all need mercy." The morally athletic att.i.tude tends to break down at last even in the most stalwart; and, in the condition of moral helplessness, "all our morality appears as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest subst.i.tute for that well-being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but alas! are not."[108] The essential fact of religion, for Royce, is man's quest for salvation; and the central and essential postulate which he considers in his recent lectures, "is the postulate that man needs to be saved."[109]

108: "Varieties," p. 47.

109: "Sources of Religious Insight," 1912, pp. 8 f.

A distinction is sometimes drawn between a "once-born" and a "twice-born" type of religious experience, but the distinction is not absolute. We have already noticed that those who can trace no abrupt change in their experience, nor tell the day or even the year of their conversion, may be zealous in evangelistic labour, and emphatic in their insistence upon the need of regeneration. A well-known example of the once-born type of religion is the late Edward Everett Hale, whose words are often quoted: "I observe, with profound regret, the religious struggles which come into many biographies, as if almost essential to the formation of a hero. I ought to speak of these, to say that any man has an advantage, not to be estimated, who is born, as I was, into a family where the religion is simple and rational; etc."[110] And yet Dr.

Hale's son, brought up in such an atmosphere, has himself described in the public press an experience under revival preaching which belongs to the "twice-born" type.[111]

110: Quoted in Starbuck, pp. 305 f.

111: See _The Literary Digest_, February 10, 1906, p. 210.

The secrets of every heart are not revealed to the psychologist, and we should not expect of him the deepest insight into the sinfulness of sin; but in emphasizing man's sense of need, of incompleteness, of restlessness and of disharmony, psychology has done much to confirm, if it cannot of itself affirm, the Scriptural statement that "all have sinned."

4. Is man saved by faith or by works, by faith or by character? As between the evangelical and the legal schemes of salvation, the answer of religious psychology is emphatically in favour of the former.

Psychologists of all schools unite in insisting that those who pa.s.s from restlessness and impotence to peace and fullness of life do so in wonderful accord with the Scriptural method of salvation by faith. The witnesses may be called, even though to a tedious degree one witness only confirms the testimony of another.

We are advised by Jastrow that it is "necessary for the life that we live that we should frequently permit the focus of our concerns and of our struggles to fade away, and allow the surgings from below to a.s.sert themselves."[112] James remarks that "there is a state of mind known to religious men, but to no others, in which the will to a.s.sert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of G.o.d.... The time for tension in our souls is over, and that of happy relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived."[113]

112: "The Subconscious," 1906, p. 543.

113: "Varieties," p. 47.

Starbuck emphasizes the surrender of the will in conversion even when the will has been consciously exercised. "We are confronted with the paradox ... that in the same persons who strive towards the higher life, self-surrender is often necessary before the sense of a.s.surance comes.

The personal will must be given up. In many cases relief persistently refuses to come until the person ceases to resist, or to make an effort in the direction he desires to go."[114] He adds that "faith is the next step after self-surrender, or even the accompaniment of it.... Then faith comes in, which means that the soul is in a receptive att.i.tude....

One throws oneself completely on the world-will, so that one may become a 'receiver of its truth and an organ of its activity.'"[115]

114: "Psychology of Religion," pp. 113, 114.

115: _Ibid._, p. 117.

Royce remarks that our religious need is supreme, and "is accompanied with the perfectly well-warranted a.s.surance that we cannot attain the goal unless we can get into some sort of communion with a real life infinitely richer than our own.... The religious ideal grows out of the vision of a spiritual freedom and peace which are not naturally ours."[116] "The little will of the conscious and limited individual,"

says J. B. Pratt, "must simply give up before the deeper will of the larger personality, stretching out from the conscious centre no one knows how far, can take control."[117]

116: "Sources of Religious Insight," pp. 53, 54.

117: "Psychology of Religious Belief," 1907, p. 161.

It is clear that the evangelical scheme of salvation, "Heaven's easy, artless, unenc.u.mber'd plan," has found strong and unexpected support from the modern study of religious experience. The impressive testimonies above, if translated into Pauline language, mean that salvation is by faith and not by works of the law. The examples from which the generalizations are made are taken mostly from orthodox circles, but even those who are but loosely attached to Christianity in its usual forms are saved in the same way. Thus James says of the mind-curers that "they have demonstrated that a form of regeneration by relaxing, by letting go, psychologically indistinguishable from the Lutheran justification by faith and the Wesleyan acceptance of free grace, is within the reach of persons who have no conviction of sin and care nothing for the Lutheran theology."[118] The theologian might contend that Christianity is a sort of "sleeping partner" in these schemes, and that they contain the mustard seed of faith sufficient to save; but, however this may be, the fact remains that the mind-cure schemes teach a form of salvation by faith, not by works.

118: "Varieties," p. 111.

The strain of attention and constant anxiety, involved in the effort to keep the law and save oneself, leads to exhaustion and despair. The struggle is hopeless, the psychologist would say, because the nervous centres become exhausted. Man cannot, however zealous for the law, by conscious activity and moral struggle attain inward peace. Salvation by works is psychologically as well as theologically impossible.

II. METAPHYSICAL IMPLICATES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

The students of religious experience are to a remarkable degree in agreement with one another and with the teachings of evangelical Christianity in their view of the place and power of religion in human life, and of the need of salvation and the way of salvation.

Disagreements arise when they seek no longer to describe religious experience but to interpret that experience. Our authorities, in technical language, agree very largely when they study the phenomenology of religion, but differ widely as to its metaphysical implicates.

It may properly be asked whether the psychology of religion, while dealing with the deep things of man, is competent to reveal the deep things of G.o.d. Should the psychologist venture to draw any inferences in the metaphysical sphere? Strictly speaking he is studying only subjective phenomena, and the self-imposed limitations of his subject should forbid him from launching into metaphysical speculation. If he cannot, as a psychologist, call his soul his own, much less can he infer that G.o.d exists or that Christianity is true. He must remain, perforce, in the outer courts of the temple, and cannot enter the inner shrine.

As a matter of fact no writer on the psychology of religious experience really confines himself within strictly empirical limits. Metaphysical inferences are in fact drawn, or very plainly suggested, and the important question becomes what inferences of this nature, whether positive or negative, are proper and legitimate. Religious experience is at any rate not self-explanatory, but points to something beyond itself, whether that something be merely a disordered nervous system, or a natural impulse such as that of s.e.x, or a department of consciousness outside of the normal, or a Great Beyond, whether conceived as Humanity or as the living G.o.d. We may consider then, (1) the physical explanation of religion, including the s.e.xual; (2) the psychological explanation; (3) the social explanation; and (4) the theological explanation.

1. Lowest in the scale is the view of religion which regards it as the result of abnormal physical or psychophysical conditions. This theory is the expression of a robust secularism, which can quote the proverb, "When the devil was sick, the devil a monk would be," and would prescribe a dose of physic (as his friends did for George Fox) for those in distress on account of their sins. "For the modern materialist, as for the ancient Manichee, sin is a question of physiology; moral depravity only a manifestation of corporeal disorder."[119] Religion and crime, in this view, both depart from the line of normal existence, and are pathological phenomena. But if religion is a disease, it afflicts men in all sorts of physical and mental states, and is practically a universal disease, taking the world at large.

119: Robert Law: "The Tests of Life," p. 131.

Akin to this pathological explanation of religion is that which sees in it either a natural expression, or else a perversion, of the s.e.xual instinct. "In a certain sense the religious life is an irradiation of the reproductive instinct,"[120] says Starbuck; and G. S. Hall says that "in its most fundamental aspect, conversion is a natural, normal, universal, and necessary process at the stage when life pivots over from an autocentric to a heterocentric basis."[121] This view is popular with those who would give a naturalistic account of the religious life, especially of conversion.

120: "Psychology of Religion," p. 401.

121: "Adolescence," Vol. II, p. 301.

In a.s.suming a close connection between human and divine love, the mystics and the materialists join hands. With both the s.e.xual is trans.m.u.ted into the spiritual. Plato made the transition in his "Phaedrus," comparing divine with human love and even with the latter in a degraded form. The s.e.xual pa.s.sion and the pa.s.sion for purity both alike stir human nature to its depths, and the love of G.o.d and the love of woman are somehow akin. Religion in all ages has made free use of the imagery of love and marriage. The close connection has been emphasized by the statistics which show that the period between twelve and twenty years is preeminently the age of conversion.

On the other hand, the relations between the s.e.xual and the religious life are so various that it does not seem possible to place them in the simple relation of cause and effect. In ancient religions there were examples of phallic worship and the mutilation of priests, of temple prost.i.tutes and vestal virgins. Polygamy and celibacy have both alike been enjoined in the name of religion. The imagery of the bride and the bridegroom has been freely used by the mystics, but it is employed as well by those who are thought to oppose religion.[122] It is true that in Christian circles the curve of conversion rises suddenly and is at its height during the adolescent period; but again the facts are not so clear as to warrant the inference that conversion is an effect of the development of the s.e.xual life. The adolescent period is the time also of the awakening of the intellectual and aesthetic faculties, of the feeling of responsibility and the stirring of ambition. Unless all of these are irradiations of the s.e.xual impulse, it cannot be said that the religious awakening, coming within this period, must be so regarded. The adolescent period is one of peculiar religious susceptibility, but in part this may be due to the influence of social pressure, brought to bear very strongly at this period by parents and teachers. Again, the exceptions on both sides are too many. Adolescents, even those under religious influences, are not always converted; indeed this period is one of peculiar susceptibility to doubt. It is notorious that this is the time when the Sunday-school and the church are apt to lose their hold on the boys, and the questionnaires show juvenile atheism as well as juvenile piety. s.e.x development cannot well be the cause both of religion and irreligion.

122: In an appreciation of the late John Davidson, it is said that "an obsession by s.e.xual metaphors was his imaginative besetting sin."--A. S. Mories, in _Westminster Review_, July, 1913, p. 81.

While conversions are most frequent in the adolescent period, they occur both before and after it, as the statistics show. The notable conversions which have been most far-reaching in their effects, such as those of Paul, Augustine, and Luther, have occurred after adolescence.