The Churches and Modern Thought

Will not the acceptance of this doctrine have a paralysing effect upon us? On the contrary. We shall be better able to discern where our salvation lies. We shall pay far more attention to the real forces which determine conduct. We shall devote our energies to combating bad heredity with good environment; and we shall do this with the knowledge that not only ourselves and our associates, but our descendants also, will reap the benefit. We shall fly from unhealthy thoughts, and avoid the surroundings likely to give rise to them. We shall welcome healthy thoughts and seek helpful surroundings.

The doctrine of determinism is thought likely to corrupt our moral character, but, in reality, it compares favourably with religious doctrines. The belief in God’s omniscience leads the Mohammedan to fatalism, and the Christian to the doctrine of predestination. If a Christian really believed as he professes, if he could honestly subscribe to the seventeenth article of his Creed—in which it is stated that “before the foundations of the world were laid God hath constantly decreed by His counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom He hath chosen [the italics are mine, of course] in Christ out of mankind”—God’s Predestination would indeed be “a dangerous downfall,” “thrusting men into desperation.” The doctrine of predestination, therefore, appears, without doubt, to be ethically mischievous. The doctrine of Determinism, on the other hand, teaches a man to fight pernicious hereditary instincts with the weapon of environment, and to keep a tender place in his heart for unfortunates who succumb.231 Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.

§ 5. Religious Experience

MYSTICISM AND CONVERSION

Of late, the argument from “Religious Experience” has been much to the front, and nothing written on the subject has created a deeper impression, or been more cordially welcomed by the supernaturalist, than Professor W. James’s book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Professor James is a prominent member of the Society for Psychical Research, and no one is better able than he to give descriptions of psychic phenomena; but the conclusions he comes to as to the spiritual signification of some of them will strike the normal man as too absurd to be taken seriously. More than this. Indirectly he furnishes one of the very best weapons for attacking supernaturalism that has ever yet been put in the hands of the naturalist. I have already given some examples of so-called religious experiences (in Chap. II., pp. 59–61). These are still regarded by the superstitious as spiritual manifestations; but Professor James discovers a spiritual interpretation in still more palpable hallucinations. Unwittingly he spoils the case for religious experience by trying to prove too much. I will give an instance. He describes how an intimate friend of his kept experiencing a “horrible sensation” of the presence of something, which he “did not recognise as any individual being or person.” Professor James admits that “such an experience as this does not connect itself with the religious sphere.” [Why not? It might have been the Devil that time.] Later on his friend had a pleasanter experience. “There was not a mere consciousness of something there, but, fused in the central happiness of it, a startling awareness of some ineffable good. Not vague either—not like the emotional effect of some poem or scent or blossom or music, but the sure knowledge of the close presence of a sort of mighty person; and, after it went, the memory persisted as the one perception of reality. Everything else might be a dream, but not that.” Professor James then remarks: “My friend, as it oddly happens, does not interpret these later experiences theistically, as signifying the presence of God.” Why oddly? The explanation seems simple enough. It was just because his friend was not odd, but a normal individual of modern times. Perhaps, after all, the secret lay in the well-known reply to the question, “Is life worth living?”—It all depends on the liver. One may also recall the words of the celebrated clerical wit who said: “They think they are pious when they are only bilious.”

Professor James then relates various experiences of other persons who, unlike his friend, were positive they had felt “the presence of God.” And he tells us: “Nothing is more common in the pages of religious biography than the way in which seasons of lively and of difficult faith are described as alternating. Probably every religious person has the recollection of particular crises in which a direct vision of the truth, a direct perception, perhaps, of a living God’s existence, swept in and overwhelmed the languor of the more ordinary belief.” If this sort of thing accounts for the faith of every religious person, the mystery (in these days) of the great faith of the few and the little faith of the many is completely solved. So few, relatively speaking, have this experience; so few are by nature mystics. Also it helps to explain the prevalence of supernatural belief in bygone ages. Thoughtful unbelievers have long ago come to the conclusion that some such psychical experiences largely account for religious superstitions, and now an eminent psychologist and religious apologist confirms their theories.

Professor James argues that “the neurotic temperament naturally introduces one to regions of religious truth which are hidden from the robust Philistine type of nervous system, that thanks heaven it hasn’t a single morbid fibre in its composition.” This kind of “robust Philistine” is, one is glad to think, a very common type. I hope I am a fairly robust Philistine myself. The Rationalist may, or may not, be emotional, but he certainly prefers to be without morbid fibres. Why, of all the most undesirable states of mind, should morbidity assist the human being to have faith in God? Why should spirituality and strong faith be possible only for a person of nervous instability whose intellectual canon (unacknowledged no doubt) is “Credo quia impossibile”? Why, in the name of all that is reasonable, should spiritual experiences be the prerogative of exceptional temperaments only? Why, in all fairness, if there be any spiritual meaning in hallucinations, should not the Agnostic be at least vouchsafed the consciousness of the Devil’s presence to cure him of his unbelief?

Professor James thinks “there can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric.” He refers to “geniuses in the religious line,” who, “like many other geniuses … have often shown symptoms of nervous instability.” “Even more perhaps,” he says, “than other kinds of genius, religious leaders have been subject to abnormal psychical visitations … often, moreover, these pathological features in their career have helped to give them their religious authority and influence.” All this is exceedingly instructive, coming as it does from the mouth of an earnest champion of religion232 specially suited, by his researches in psychical phenomena, to speak with authority on the psychology of religion. His belief in the interference in human life of spiritual agencies, and the whole tenour of his book, render it certain that he is not consciously bringing any arguments to bear against supernaturalism, but, on the contrary, intends to adduce new arguments in its favour.

Have we not here a satisfactory and perfectly natural explanation of the phenomena of conversion? The religionist is apt, I think, to lose sight of the fact that conversion is not confined to any one particular creed; that it cannot witness to the truth of the one and not of the other. “The mystical feeling,” remarks Professor James (pp. 425–6), “of enlargement, union, and emancipation … is capable of forming matrimonial alliances with material furnished by the most diverse philosophies and theologies, provided only they can find a place in their framework for its peculiar emotional mood.” The most striking examples of conversion are those of the instantaneous kind, of which St. Paul’s is held out to us as the most eminent. I have already outlined the probable explanation in St. Paul’s case, and other cases may be similarly explained. The supernaturalist’s interpretation of conversion cannot be considered seriously until proofs are forthcoming of an instance in which nothing was known previously of the truth alleged to have been revealed. Like Mr. Lowes Dickinson, I have never, for example, discovered a case in which a Mohammedan or a Hindoo, without having heard of Christianity, has had a revelation of Christian “truth.”

Of all visions, those of the death-bed especially invite our attention, for they are looked upon by many pious persons as sure evidence in favour of the truth of their Faith. Will this argument bear analysis? We know that good men and women have had heavenly visions during their last moments. We know also that others of equally blameless lives have been terrified at the last by the sight of some supreme horror. How can any argument be based upon the phantasms of a disordered brain? Do not these visions, too, usually take their form from the teaching with which the mind has been imbued? The Mohammedan sees a heaven peopled with houris; do we on that account accept the Koran as our guide? A dying Hindoo may have a vision of a heathen deity of questionable character, and derive comfort from it. I have myself stood by the bedside of a dying Mahratta whose ravings during the delirium of fever indicated such a vision. There are, it is true, cases where the visions of the dying may seem utterly unlike those we should expect. But the brain retains impressions of things of which the conscious memory has long ago passed away, and, if the early history of the ecstatic could be fully known, we should, as Proctor points out,233 find nearly every circumstance of his vision explained, or at least an explanation suggested. It may be said again of death-bed visions, as of visions generally, that there has never yet been a case of a Mohammedan or a Hindoo or any other non-Christian who has had a revelation of Christian “truth.”

Professor James is not the only person having the curious notion that an abnormal state of mind admits the nearer presence of God. To take a people possessing a marvellous self-control over their emotions, and, therefore, the last among whom you would expect to find such ideas, I may mention that the more ignorant and superstitious among the Japanese throw themselves into hypnotic trances, and then fondly imagine that a god is present in their body, and is making use of them as a mouthpiece.234 Again, no superstition is commoner among the ignorant natives of India, Mohammedan and Hindoo alike, than that people of unsound mind have some sort of special means of communication with God; but that educated persons, having fairly normal minds themselves, should hold such an opinion is yet another example of the hallucinations to which religious enthusiasts are liable.

The folly of attributing any spiritual significance to these experiences will be better understood if we compare them with cases where there is no religious element whatsoever. A lady, a friend of mine, is continually subject to a curious experience, which may serve to illustrate this point. I give the account of it in her own words:—

As a child I was always a bad sleeper, and got into the habit of making up stories to amuse myself when lying awake in bed. This habit continued as I grew older; but, after a time, the stories ceased to be connected in any way with myself. Years ago I began a story which has grown gradually through three generations, and there are signs of the coming of a fourth. The old house has remained as the centre of the story for years; most of the characters are men, and no one of either sex bears any possible relationship to me. They have all become far more real to me than my own relations; at bed-time, on long railway journeys (sometimes), or when I am walking or doing needlework, they are there. If I get to the house at bed-time, I sleep well. If I am there when travelling, I don’t get tired, and the characters grow and develop quite naturally. It is my inner life, and, if I were given that way, it might become a series of visions. I can quite understand men having ecstasies in which the ideals they have always before them become apparently materialised.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER

I cannot too strongly insist that all this is extremely instructive. It explains so many things that still have to be explained, if religion be untrue. The new science of psychology has already accounted for many abnormal phenomena that were formerly considered miraculous—“faith cures,”235 for instance. Does it not account for the effects of prayer? We know nothing of the efficacy of prayer in securing material benefits—there is no proof either way; but we do know that it has often an ethical value, and is also a means of strengthening faith. Does it necessarily follow that a Supernatural Being hears and answers the suppliant’s prayers? I think not. Suggestion, it is now known, exercises an extraordinary influence over the subjective mind. In prayer auto-suggestion undoubtedly plays its subtle rôle.

Let me give an example of the benign results that may be effected by suggestion without any appeal to the supernatural. Often a moral change for the worse in a most estimable person is distinctly traceable to causes over which he or she had no control, and the physician or surgeon, having diagnosed the case, proceeds to do his best to bring about a cure. Where it is some nervous malady, mental therapeutics or psychic healing is sometimes extremely efficacious.236 Vices and weaknesses are now looked upon by many in the light of diseases and ailments—curable, ameliorable, or incurable, as the case may be. Disease or Devil, the fact remains that medical treatment may effect a cure even where the patient’s disorder has been brought on by, as we say, his own fault. Dipsomania, morphinomania, kleptomania, nymphomania, satyriasis, and various moral perversions may yield to a purely natural treatment, whether it be the method of a Milne Bramwell (by suggestion) or of Keeley.

When denouncing Mariolatry (in his sermon at the opening of the Church Congress, October, 1905), the Bishop of London said: “It is not revealed that the cry to any saint or to the Virgin Mary ever reaches them at all.” Apparently, therefore, the Bishop admits that appeals to the supernatural may be wasted, and this in spite of the suppliant being very much in earnest. Yet who would be prepared to say that the Roman Catholic who prays to the Virgin Mary and to innumerable saints does not derive quite as much benefit from the process as the Protestant who directs his worship solely to the Holy Trinity, or the Shintoist who invokes the benign spirits of his ancestors?237 The effect of the suggestion is the same in each case, and has all the appearance of an answer to prayer.

Again, putting aside abnormal phases of the mind, is it not, as Ralph Waldo Trine puts it (in his little book, Character Building: Thought Power), a simple psychological law that any type of thought, if entertained for a sufficient length of time, will, by and by, reach the motor tracts of the brain, and finally burst forth into action? There seems no need for the introduction of a supernatural hypothesis to explain the moral effect of prayer. So, also, with regard to faith, it is only natural that the believer, racked with doubt, should find reassurance in prayer.

The Theist who lays store by the evidence from “religious experience” will do well to ponder over the following words of one of Professor James’s critics: “Instead of producing anything that would strengthen the belief in extra-human spirit agents influencing human destinies, psychology has made intelligible, conformably to the rest of our organised knowledge, most, if not all, of the striking phenomena which have been the empirical props of the popular faith in spiritism, whether Christian or not. We refer to anæsthesias, analgesias, hallucinations, monitions, trances, the sense of illumination in ecstasy, etc., including the facts considered in Professor James’ lectures. In making this statement, I do not forget the work of the Society for Psychical Research. Its achievements may be declared to have been so far, and without prejudice of the future, absolutely inconclusive with regard to spiritism.”238 In other words, psychical research, if conducted by the experimental method and without bias, may be pregnant with consequences hardly in accord with the hopes of either the spiritist or spiritualist (in its religious sense). For, should abnormal phenomena of all kinds admit of a natural explanation, their present obscurity will no longer furnish grounds for supernatural speculation.

THE RELIGIOUS (?) EXPERIENCES OF INTOXICATION

According to Professor James’s theory, it is the person who chances to have a well-developed subliminal life who is predestined to be saved, for then God will be able to reach him. As Professor James informs us that “nitrous oxide and ether, especially nitrous oxide, when sufficiently diluted with air, stimulate the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree,” so that “depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler,” the unbelieving Philistine ought to be recommended to inhale this truth-revealing, and therefore faith-producing, gas. Like music, it must be meant as an aid to worship. The new beatitude will then be, as Mr. Leuba remarks, “Blessed are the intoxicated, for to them the kingdom of spirits is revealed!” I can quite understand the interest aroused by Professor James’s remarkable book; but that Theists and would-be Theists should take its chief conclusion seriously is beyond me—or, rather, I should say it is one more proof to me that the inherited capacity for superstition is still strong within us. We can understand why supernatural beliefs die hard.

MUSIC AND THE EMOTIONS.239

Are our emotions reliable guides, or are they not? Though the motive-power in our nature, though they go to make up that heart upon which Mr. Fielding so eloquently discourses in his Hearts of Men, do they not need to be carefully controlled by reason? Are they not the very same emotions which, in all but religious matters, are admittedly a fruitful source of self-deception? Take the emotion excited by music. I know many good people who think they possess considerable religious feeling, and have had a religious experience, because they are peculiarly affected by music, and especially by fine sacred music.240 Similarly, Dr. Torrey’s “Glory Song” appeals to the untrained ear of his emotional audiences, and the Salvation band, all out of tune, elevates the soul of the Salvationist. Yet lower down the scale of musical culture we find a clash of discordant sounds exciting the religious emotions of the savage. Is it too much to say that these “experiences” differ only in degree from those of the dog who howls as certain notes affect him? Granted that music, suited to the taste of the worshipper, is an aid to worship, we have to remember that there are those whose temperaments are so constituted that they are more or less unaffected by music—good, bad, or indifferent—and, if the religious feeling evoked be from God, may we not ask in all reverence: “Why should the unmusical be debarred from this means of feeling His presence? Why should the man without a note of music in his composition have this much less chance of eternal salvation?” Surely we are not to take seriously and literally the words of our great philosopher-poet when he says: “Let no such man be trusted”?

SEXUAL LOVE

Again, there is the religious feeling evoked by that strongest emotion of all—sexual love; the one excites the other, and the effect produced may be beneficial or may be mischievous. But sexual love appears to me a strange aid to the worship of God; and persons who really imagine they are nearer Him when in this state of emotion most certainly deceive themselves. The ascetic who is debarred from this particular “religious” experience should agree with me.

REVIVALISM

An examination of religious experiences, however brief, cannot well omit all mention of the question of revivalism. Has it an ethical value? Has it a spiritual meaning? To the latter question the answer of the Church is for the most part in the affirmative. In his Pentecostal message for Whitsuntide, 1905, the Archbishop of Canterbury refers, without directly naming them, to the extraordinary movement of which the young Evan Roberts has been the leader, and to the preaching of Messrs. Torrey and Alexander in London. “To whatever cause or combination of causes we may attribute it,” he says, “the fact appears to be certain that expression has this year been given in an unusual degree to a desire for increased spiritual earnestness in the Christian life.” I shall not embark upon the question of the spiritual signification of revivalism. My remarks on other religious experiences may be taken to apply here also. Regarding its ethical value, I fancy most thoughtful onlookers will be with me when I say that it is unadvisable to stir up hysteria in hysterical people just for the sake of effects, the usefulness of which is extremely problematical—effects which, if they benefit a few, are harmful to the majority, and, in any case, are unlikely to be of a permanent nature. We have it on excellent authority that “emotional appeals and revivals do not destroy carnal sin in schools, and it is well known how often they seem to stimulate, to increase, immorality.”241

§ 6. The Inevitable Conclusion

A candid and unbiassed examination of the so-called theistic proofs can but lead to the one conclusion: they are worthless. Even if the cosmological and teleological arguments were satisfactory, and even if “religious” experiences proved the existence of a spirit world, the ethical argument undoubtedly breaks down, carrying along with it all that fragile structure of which the theist’s theories are composed. Yes, the problem of evil is insoluble. “We have not,” says John Stuart Mill,242 “to attempt the impossible problem of reconciling infinite benevolence and justice with infinite power in the Creator of such a world as this. To attempt to do so not only involves absolute contradiction in an intellectual point of view, but exhibits to excess the revolting spectacle of a Jesuitical defence of moral enormities.” The latest defence by an approved apologist of the Church of England will be found in chap. xiv. of Pro Fide. It has been conducted with conspicuous candour, and such harsh terms as “Jesuitical” and “revolting” are no longer applicable. Whether, however, this is likely to prove any more successful than previous attempts, and to serve as an antidote to scepticism, may be seen by a glance at the following summary of the line of argument. The author relies, to begin with, upon the theological assumption that moral evil arises from the abuse of God’s gift to man of a free will. He also argues that the transmission of a tendency to sin is not unjust, because a remedy for it has been provided. As for physical evil, this, he maintains, subserves important moral purposes in the case of man, and in the case of animals it is more than compensated for by physical good. In the end, however, he is forced, as we have seen, to fall back upon the hypothesis of a personal devil. In other words, he presents us with those sophistical arguments of theistic apologists which we have been investigating, and then, finding, as a perfectly honest mind must find, that these are inadequate, he has, after all, to rely upon those ancient theological dogmas which owe their origin to the insolubility of the problem. Let those accept his special pleading who can. There are many who read an apologetic work with minds already made up to be persuaded by it, and where there is this bias there cannot be straight thinking. For those who keep an open mind the conclusion is inevitable: apart from the revelation which has been called in question there is no proof, there never can be any proof, of the existence of the God of the Christian. If there be a First Cause, if there be a Supreme Intelligence, if there be a Deity at all, we know nothing of His nature and nothing of His intentions with regard to us.

NOTE ON RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY

An examination of the development of philosophy leads to conclusions of considerable import. Our present inquiry can be only an exceedingly rapid one; but anyone wishing to study the subject a little more fully will find it concisely treated in a book called Science and Faith, by Dr. Paul Topinard, late General Secretary of the Anthropological Society of Paris. From Chapter VIII. I cull the following:—