The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. William James
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under certain circumstances even be blasphemous to wish it away.
Of course there have been exceptions to this, and cures by special miracle have at all times been recognized within the church's pale, almost all the great saints having more or less performed them. It was one of the heresies of Edward Irving, to maintain them still to be possible. An extremely pure faculty of healing after confession and conversion on the patient's part, and prayer on the priest's, was quite spontaneously developed in the German pastor, Joh. Christoph Blumhardt, in the early forties and exerted during nearly thirty years. Blumhardt's Life by Zündel (5th edition, Zurich, 1887) gives in chapters ix., x., xi., and xvii. a pretty full account of his healing activity, which he invariably ascribed to direct divine interposition. Blumhardt was a singularly pure, simple, and non-fanatical character, and in this part of his work followed no previous model. In Chicago to-day we have the case of Dr. J. A. Dowie, a Scottish Baptist preacher, whose weekly “Leaves of Healing” were in the year of grace 1900 in their sixth volume, and who, although he denounces the cures wrought in other sects as “diabolical counterfeits” of his own exclusively “Divine Healing,” must on the whole be counted into the mind-cure movement. In mind-cure circles the fundamental article of faith is that disease should never be accepted. It is wholly of the pit. God wants us to be absolutely healthy, and we should not tolerate ourselves on any lower terms.
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Edwards, from whose book on the Revival in New England I quote these words, dissuades from such a use of prayer, but it is easy to see that he enjoys making his thrust at the cold dead church members.
57
H. W. Dresser: Voices of Freedom, 46.
58
Dresser: Living by the Spirit, 58.
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Dresser: Voices of Freedom, 33.
60
Trine: In Tune with the Infinite, p. 214.
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Trine: p. 117.
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Quoted by Lejeune: Introd. à la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 66.
63
Henry Wood: Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography, pp. 51, 70 (abridged).
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See Appendix to this lecture for two other cases furnished me by friends.
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Whether the various spheres or systems are ever to fuse integrally into one absolute conception, as most philosophers assume that they must, and how, if so, that conception may best be reached, are questions that only the future can answer. What is certain now is the fact of lines of disparate conception, each corresponding to some part of the world's truth, each verified in some degree, each leaving out some part of real experience.
66
Tract on God, Man, and Happiness, Book ii. ch. x.
67
Commentary on Galatians, Philadelphia, 1891, pp. 510-514 (abridged).
68
Molinos: Spiritual Guide, Book II., chaps. xvii., xviii. (abridged).
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I say this in spite of the monistic utterances of many mind-cure writers; for these utterances are really inconsistent with their attitude towards disease, and can easily be shown not to be logically involved in the experiences of union with a higher Presence with which they connect themselves. The higher Presence, namely, need not be the absolute whole of things, it is quite sufficient for the life of religious experience to regard it as a part, if only it be the most ideal part.
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Cf. J. Milsand: Luther et le Serf-Arbitre, 1884,
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He adds with characteristic healthy-mindedness: “Our business is to continue to fail in good spirits.”
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The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of this world. To our own consciousness there is usually a residuum of worth left over after our sins and errors have been told off—our capacity of acknowledging and regretting them is the germ of a better self
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E.g., Iliad, XVII. 446: “Nothing then is more wretched anywhere than man of all that breathes and creeps upon this earth.”
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E.g., Theognis, 425-428: “Best of all for all things upon earth is it not to be born nor to behold the splendors of the Sun; next best to traverse as soon as possible the gates of Hades.” See also the almost identical passage in Œdipus in Colonus, 1225.—The Anthology is full of pessimistic utterances: “Naked came I upon the earth, naked I go below the ground—why then do I vainly toil when I see the end naked before me?”—“How did I come to be? Whence am I? Wherefore did I come? To pass away. How can I learn aught when naught I know? Being naught I came to life: once more shall I be what I was. Nothing and nothingness is the whole race of mortals.”—“For death we are all cherished and fattened like a herd of hogs that is wantonly butchered.”
The difference between Greek pessimism and the oriental and modern variety is that the Greeks had not made the discovery that the pathetic mood may be idealized, and figure as a higher form of sensibility. Their spirit was still too essentially masculine for pessimism to be elaborated or lengthily dwelt on in their classic literature. They would have despised a life set wholly in a minor key, and summoned it to keep within the proper bounds of lachrymosity. The discovery that the enduring emphasis, so far as this world goes, may be laid on its pain and failure, was reserved for races more complex, and (so to speak) more feminine than the Hellenes had attained to being in the classic period. But all the same was the outlook of those Hellenes blackly pessimistic.
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For instance, on the very day on which I write this page, the post brings me some aphorisms from a worldly-wise old friend in Heidelberg which may serve as a good contemporaneous expression of Epicureanism: “By the word ‘happiness’ every human being understands something different. It is a phantom pursued only by weaker minds. The wise man is satisfied with the more modest but much more definite term
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Ribot: Psychologie des sentiments, p. 54.