Religious observance

“ Apart from what prayer may lead to, Protestant mystical experience appears to have been almost exclusively sporadic. It has been left to our mind-curers to reintroduce methodical meditation into our religious life. ”

“ Those who smile at the belief of a deep and religious mind in the mysterious interventions and indications of Providence in the guidance of human life, will open their eyes at the feeling which leads him to tell the story of his earliest recollections of Roman Catholic peculiarities, and of the cross imprinted on his exercise-book. ”

“ We call attention to the term “doctrines”—therefore religious beliefs: reasonable, plausible, satisfying beliefs. What are they? First: Ritualism is Religion; when we have gone through a certain proscribed programme—whether it be a chant, reading prayers, or burning a dim light—there you are. How do we know we are religious? ”

“ The normality of religion is further shown in the instinctive turning of the soul to God, or to some higher power, in times of crisis and danger. The religious consciousness is best interrogated, not in times of mechanical routine or worldly preoccupation, but in those moments when we seem to ourselves to be most religious, in moments of clearest insight, or of deepest emotion, or of some crisis in action. ”

“ He will see and hear many things which powerfully tend to increase and perpetuate his serious impressions. He moves in a circle where God, the soul, and salvation are regarded as of supreme importance—where religion is presented to him—not as a cold abstraction, but living in the persons of its disciples. 3. No one will continue to walk with religious persons after his serious impressions are effaced, and it is presumed that no one who continued to be the subject of religious impressions for any length of time ever failed to become religious. ”

“ Nor, again, can religion be adequately and exhaustively dealt with by the psychological method of investigation. The psychological studies of religion in recent years have greatly enriched our knowledge of the range and scope and power of man's psychic nature and functions, of his instincts, desires, valuations, needs, yearnings, beliefs, and modes of activity and behaviour, and particularly of the important influence which the social group has exercised and still exercises in the furtherance of religious attitudes and ideals. ”

“ Religious work, the most direct spiritual activity, visiting the sick, or preaching the gospel, or celebrating the sacraments, make a tremendous call upon our devotional powers and directly tend to lower our spiritual vitality, unless we seek abundant and frequent renewal thereof at the source of all spiritual vitality and life. ”

“ In it religious of every order may find celestial manna for the daily food of their devotion. In it, in fine, every person of every state may learn how to appreciate the eternal truths and the mysteries of our holy faith; and also how to live well, if they will frequently read and meditate upon them. ”

“ If the little life is in thy heart, my brother, let me implore thee to seek its growth by prayer, by public and social worship, by seeking acquaintance with the mind of the Spirit in holy Scripture. The Times newspaper—and the testimony of a secular journal may have weight on this matter—said not long ago in a leader: “We question if any person of any class ever read the Scriptures regularly and thoroughly without being or becoming not only religious, but sensible and consistent.” ”

“ The essence of religious experiences, the thing by which we finally must judge them, must be that element or quality in them which we can meet nowhere else. And such a quality will be of course most prominent and easy to notice in those religious experiences which are most one-sided, exaggerated, and intense. ”

“ The religious objects, whatever they otherwise may prove to be, shall be defined as objects such that, when we know them, and in case we can know them, this knowledge of them helps to show us the way of salvation. The central and essential postulate of whatever religion we, in these lectures, are to consider, is the postulate that man {9} needs to be saved. And religious insight shall for us mean insight into the way of salvation and into those objects whereof the knowledge conduces to salvation. ”

“ But to be religious in the world—to be pious and holy and earnest-minded in the counting-room, the manufactory, the market-place, the field, the farm—to cany our good and solemn thoughts and feelings into the throng and thoroughfare of daily life,—this is the great difficulty of our Christian calling. ”

“ By the confession even of the ministers at the altars, nothing is more rare than the interior and spiritual religion, which is alone capable of regulating the life of man, and of triumphing over his inclinations. In good faith, among the most numerous and the most devotional people, are there many capable of understanding the principles of their religious system, and who find them of sufficient strength to stifle their perverse inclinations? ”

“ I understand: if from men religious or secular, even in the mystical body of Holy Church, you have suffered persecution or displeasure, or have been visited with the indignation of the Vicar of Christ, either on your own account, or if you have had something to bear on my account with all these people— you are not to resist, but bear it patiently, leaving at once, and going into your cell, there to know yourself in holy meditation ”

“ But in addition to these ideas of the more concrete religious objects, religion is full of abstract objects which prove to have an equal power. God's attributes as such, his holiness, his justice, his mercy, his absoluteness, his infinity, his omniscience, his tri-unity, the various mysteries of the redemptive process, the operation of the sacraments, etc., have proved fertile wells of inspiring meditation for Christian believers. ”

“ Worship and sacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions of the deity, theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organization, are the essentials of religion in the institutional branch. Were we to limit our view to it, we should have to define religion as an external art, the art of winning the favor of the gods. In the more personal branch of religion it is on the contrary the inner dispositions of man himself which form the centre of interest, his conscience, his deserts, his helplessness, his incompleteness. ”

“ But, whilst ritual at least represents routine, it tends, historically speaking, to have a far deeper significance for the religious consciousness. A recurrent feature of religion, which many students of its phenomena would even consider constant and typical, is the attribution of a more or less self-contained and automatic efficacy to the ritual procedure as such. ”

“ There is not one grace of the Spirit of God, of the existence of which, in any professor of religion, Christian practice is not the most decisive evidence.... The degree in which our experience is productive of practice shows the degree in which our experience is spiritual and divine.”
Catholic writers are equally emphatic. The good dispositions which a vision, or voice, or other apparent heavenly favor leave behind them are the only marks by which we may be sure they are not possible deceptions of the tempter. ”

“ There is a mysterious influence in our religious service—a mixture of heavenly aspirations and earth-born delights, which powerfully awakens the better feelings of our nature; softening the heart and rendering it more sensitive to tender and lasting impressions. ”

“ The position we profess to occupy as a religious body, is a subject for profound reflection. We testify to having received a knowledge, through the revelations of heaven, concerning the restoration of the ancient Gospel and holy Priesthood, whereby we have been authorized to preach by inspiration, and administer to the world the principles of life and salvation. ”

“ They are usually connected with emotion or neural excitement, and may even take the guise of sense-manifestations. Through such convictions, religious minds are assured of God and the soul’s communion with Him. ”

“ We are witnessing a religious and mystical phenomenon of ultimate significance, that which the Churches insist must happen in a regenerated heart, that which religions of all climes and ages affirm as of paramount importance⁠—sign and proof of spiritual awakening. ”

“ The enlightened soul can see the invisible, and live its true life in the suprasensible sphere. The primary evidence for the truth of religion is religious experience, which in persons of religious genius—those whom the Church calls saints and prophets—includes a clear perception of an eternal world of truth, beauty, and goodness, surrounding us and penetrating us at every point. ”

“ So much for Prayer, taken in the wide sense of any kind of communion. As the core of religion, we must return to it in the next lecture.
The last aspect of the religious life which remains for me to touch upon is the fact that its manifestations so frequently connect themselves with the subconscious part of our existence. You may remember what I said in my opening lecture [23] about the prevalence of the psychopathic temperament in religious biography. You will in point of fact hardly find a religious leader of any kind in whose life there is no record of automatisms. ”

“ Our question, you will remember, is as to whether religion stands approved by its fruits, as these are exhibited in the saintly type of character. Single attributes of saintliness may, it is true, be temperamental endowments, found in non-religious individuals. ”

“ When our religious consciousness, resting upon the authority of the Church, teaches us that God created the world by His almighty will, that He guides the stars in their courses, and vouchsafes to all His creatures their existence and their well-being, the question Why? ”

“ To answer the question, we must go back to the primitive facts of religious consciousness within us. Then we find religion is voluntary obedience to the law of God, inward and outward obedience to that law he has written on our nature, revealed in various ways through Instinct, Reason, Conscience, and the Religious emotions. Through it we regard Him as the absolute object of Reverence, Faith, and Love. ”

“ And here let me remark that the strength of the Church consists in the personal knowledge and testimony of the members. The Spirit of God fills each member with unfaltering faith, and he builds his superstructure of religious belief on personal knowledge, imparted to him, by the power of the Spirit, through revelation. ”

“ And such instances are peculiarly instructive, because many great men of science, as a result of their personal temperament and training, are little interested in the forms of the visible church, and very frequently are loath to admit that their calling has religious bearings. ”

“ The ground of the specific assurance in religious dogmas is then an affective experience. The objects of faith may even be preposterous; the affective stream will float them along, and invest them with unshakable certitude. ”

“ The goal of the religious life is personal communion with Him, the intuitive apprehension and spontaneous acceptance of His will, the Beatific Vision of His excellencies. But this state of blessedness cannot be reached by mere self-discipline; the prayers, the meditations, the good works of the isolated and uninstructed individual, can only serve to condone a state of irremediable ignorance. ”

“ These two mediations of necessity, therefore, of which one leads to religion and the other takes place within religious consciousness itself, comprise the forms of religious consciousness as it appears as feeling, sense-perception, and idea or ordinary thought. ”

“ But now the hour has come when mysticism must be faced in good earnest, and those broken threads wound up together. One may say truly, I think, that personal religious experience has its root and centre in mystical states of consciousness; so for us, who in these lectures are treating personal experience as the exclusive subject of our study, such states of consciousness ought to form the vital chapter from which the other chapters get their light. ”

“ Religious insight must be distinguished from other sorts of insight by its object, or by its various characteristic objects. Now, I have no time to undertake, in this opening discourse, any adequate definition of the term Religion or of the features that make an object a religious object. Religion has a long and complex history, and a tragic variety of forms and of objects of belief. And so religion varies prodigiously in its characteristics from age to age, from one portion of the human race to another, from one individual to another. ”

“ Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow. ”

“ If accepted, such descriptions and explanations serve likewise as the basis of our understanding of and, perhaps, the tools for intervention in the present and transcendent worlds. It should be noted here that unlike the scientific discourse, religious confirmation could be highly personal and subjective. ”

“ A recent writer on the psychology of religion defines religion as man's consciousness of his highest social values, and maintains that all religious beliefs are attempts to express this consciousness in whatever terms a given stage of civilisation makes natural and possible. ”

“ Lectures XIV And XV. The Value Of Saintliness. We have now passed in review the more important of the phenomena which are regarded as fruits of genuine religion and characteristics of men who are devout. To-day we have to change our attitude from that of description to that of appreciation; we have to ask whether the fruits in question can help us to judge the absolute value of what religion adds to human life. ”

“ The whole outcome of these lectures will, I imagine, be the emphasizing to your mind of the enormous diversities which the spiritual lives of different men exhibit. Their wants, their susceptibilities, and their capacities all vary and must be classed under different heads. The result is that we have really different types of religious experience; and, seeking in these lectures closer acquaintance with the healthy-minded type, we must take it where we find it in most radical form. ”