Lectures IV and V

 

The Religion Of Healthy Mindedness

 

IF we were to ask the question:  "What is human life's chief concern?" one of the answers we should receive would be:  "It is happiness."  How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.  The hedonistic school in ethics deduces the moral life wholly from the experiences of happiness and unhappiness which different kinds of conduct bring; and, even more in the religious life than in the moral life, happiness and unhappiness seem to be the poles round which the interest revolves. We need not go so far as to say with the author whom I lately quoted that any persistent enthusiasm is, as such, religion, nor need we call mere laughter a religious exercise; but we must admit that any persistent enjoyment may PRODUCE the sort of religion which consists in a grateful admiration of the gift of so happy an existence; and we must also acknowledge that the more complex ways of experiencing religion are new manners of producing happiness, wonderful inner paths to a supernatural kind of happiness, when the first gift of natural existence is unhappy, as it so often proves itself to be.

 

With such relations between religion and happiness, it is perhaps not surprising that men come to regard the happiness which a religious belief affords as a proof of its truth.  If a creed makes a man feel happy, he almost inevitably adopts it.  Such a belief ought to be true; therefore it is true--such, rightly or wrongly, is one of the "immediate inferences" of the religious logic used by ordinary men.

 

"The near presence of God's spirit," says a German writer,[31] "may be experienced in its reality--indeed ONLY experienced. And the mark by which the spirit's existence and nearness are made irrefutably clear to those who have ever had the experience is the utterly incomparable FEELING OF HAPPINESS which is connected with the nearness, and which is therefore not only a possible and altogether proper feeling for us to have here below, but is the best and most indispensable proof of God's reality.  No other proof is equally convincing, and therefore happiness is the point from which every efficacious new theology should start."

 

[31] C. Hilty: Gluck, dritter Theil, 1900, p. 18.

 

 

 

In the hour immediately before us, I shall invite you to consider the simpler kinds of religious happiness, leaving the more complex sorts to be treated on a later day.

 

In many persons, happiness is congenital and irreclaimable. "Cosmic emotion" inevitably takes in them the form of enthusiasm and freedom.  I speak not only of those who are animally happy.  I mean those who, when unhappiness is offered or proposed to them, positively refuse to feel it, as if it were something mean and wrong.  We find such persons in every age, passionately flinging themselves upon their sense of the goodness of life, in spite of the hardships of their own condition, and in spite of the sinister theologies into which they may he born.  From the outset their religion is one of union with the divine.  The heretics who went before the reformation are lavishly accused by the church writers of antinomian practices, just as the first Christians were accused of indulgence in orgies by the Romans.  It is probable that there never has been a century in which the deliberate refusal to think ill of life has not been idealized by a sufficient number of persons to form sects, open or secret, who claimed all natural things to be permitted.  Saint Augustine's maxim, Dilige et quod vis fac--if you but love [God], you may do as you incline--is morally one of the profoundest of observations, yet it is pregnant, for such persons, with passports beyond the bounds of conventional morality.  According to their characters they have been refined or gross; but their belief has been at all times systematic enough to constitute a definite religious attitude.  God was for them a giver of freedom, and the sting of evil was overcome.  Saint Francis and his immediate disciples were, on the whole, of this company of spirits, of which there are of course infinite varieties.  Rousseau in the earlier years of his writing, Diderot, B. de Saint Pierre, and many of the leaders of the eighteenth century anti-Christian movement were of this optimistic type. They owed their influence to a certain authoritativeness in their feeling that Nature, if you will only trust her sufficiently, is absolutely good.

 

It is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhaps more often feminine than masculine, and young than old, whose soul is of this sky-blue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all enchanting innocencies than with dark human passions, who can think no ill of man or God, and in whom religious gladness, being in possession from the outset, needs no deliverance from any antecedent burden.

 

"God has two families of children on this earth," says Francis W. Newman,[32] "the once-born and the twice-born," and the once-born he describes as follows:  "They see God, not as a strict Judge, not as a Glorious Potentate; but as the animating Spirit of a beautiful harmonious world, Beneficent and Kind, Merciful as well as Pure.  The same characters generally have no metaphysical tendencies:  they do not look back into themselves. Hence they are not distressed by their own imperfections:  yet it would be absurd to call them self-righteous; for they hardly think of themselves AT ALL.  This childlike quality of their nature makes the opening of religion very happy to them:  for they no more shrink from God, than a child from an emperor, before whom the parent trembles:  in fact, they have no vivid conception of ANY of the qualities in which the severer Majesty of God consists.[33] He is to them the impersonation of Kindness and Beauty.  They read his character, not in the disordered world of man, but in romantic and harmonious nature. Of human sin they know perhaps little in their own hearts and not very much in the world; and human suffering does but melt them to tenderness.  Thus, when they approach God, no inward disturbance ensues; and without being as yet spiritual, they have a certain complacency and perhaps romantic sense of excitement in their simple worship."

 

[32] The Soul; its Sorrows and its Aspirations, 3d edition, 1852, pp. 89, 91.

 

[33] I once heard a lady describe the pleasure it gave her to think that she "could always cuddle up to God."

 

 

 

In the Romish Church such characters find a more congenial soil to grow in than in Protestantism, whose fashions of feeling have been set by minds of a decidedly pessimistic order.  But even in Protestantism they have been abundant enough; and in its recent "liberal" developments of Unitarianism and latitudinarianism generally, minds of this order have played and still are playing leading and constructive parts.  Emerson himself is an admirable example.  Theodore Parker is another--here are a couple of characteristic passages from Parker's correspondence.[34]

 

[34] John Weiss:  Life of Theodore Parker, i. 152, 32.

 

 

 

"Orthodox scholars say:  'In the heathen classics you find no consciousness of sin.' It is very true--God be thanked for it. They were conscious of wrath, of cruelty, avarice, drunkenness, lust, sloth, cowardice, and other actual vices, and struggled and got rid of the deformities, but they were not conscious of 'enmity against God,' and didn't sit down and whine and groan against non-existent evil.  I have done wrong things enough in my life, and do them now; I miss the mark, draw bow, and try again.  But I am not conscious of hating God, or man, or right, or love, and I know there is much 'health in me', and in my body, even now, there dwelleth many a good thing, spite of consumption and Saint Paul."  In another letter Parker writes:  "I have swum in clear sweet waters all my days; and if sometimes they were a little cold, and the stream ran adverse and something rough, it was never too strong to be breasted and swum through.  From the days of earliest boyhood, when I went stumbling through the grass, . . . up to the gray-bearded manhood of this time, there is none but has left me honey in the hive of memory that I now feed on for present delight. When I recall the years . . . I am filled with a sense of sweetness and wonder that such little things can make a mortal so exceedingly rich.  But I must confess that the chiefest of all my delights is still the religious."

 

Another good expression of the "once-born" type of consciousness, developing straight and natural, with no element of morbid compunction or crisis, is contained in the answer of Dr. Edward Everett Hale, the eminent Unitarian preacher and writer, to one of Dr. Starbuck's circulars.  I quote a part of it:--

 

"I observe, with profound regret, the religious struggles which come into many biographies, as if almost essential to the formation of the 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; who is trained in the theory of such a religion, so that he never knows, for an hour, what these religious or irreligious struggles are.  I always knew God loved me, and I was always grateful to him for the world he placed me in.  I always liked to tell him so, and was always glad to receive his suggestions to me. . . . I can remember perfectly that when I was coming to manhood, the half-philosophical novels of the time had a deal to say about the young men and maidens who were facing the 'problem of life.' I had no idea whatever what the problem of life was.  To live with all my might seemed to me easy; to learn where there was so much to learn seemed pleasant and almost of course; to lend a hand, if one had a chance, natural; and if one did this, why, he enjoyed life because he could not help it, and without proving to himself that he ought to enjoy it. . . . A child who is early taught that he is God's child, that he may live and move and have his being in God, and that he has, therefore, infinite strength at hand for the conquering of any difficulty, will take life more easily, and probably will make more of it, than one who is told that he is born the child of wrath and wholly incapable of good."[35]

 

[35] Starbuck:  Psychology of Religion, pp. 305, 306.

 

 

 

One can but recognize in such writers as these the presence of a temperament organically weighted on the side of cheer and fatally forbidden to linger, as those of opposite temperament linger, over the darker aspects of the universe. In some individuals optimism may become quasi-pathological. The capacity for even a transient sadness or a momentary humility seems cut off from them as by a kind of congenital anaesthesia.[36]

 

[36] "I know not to what physical laws philosophers will some day refer the feelings of melancholy.  For myself, I find that they are the most voluptuous of all sensations," writes Saint Pierre, and accordingly he devotes a series of sections of his work on Nature to the Plaisirs de la Ruine, Plaisirs des Tombeaux, Ruines de la Nature, Plaisirs de la Solitude--each of them more optimistic than the last.

 

This finding of a luxury in woe is very common during adolescence. The truth-telling Marie Bashkirtseff expresses it well:--

 

"In his depression and dreadful uninterrupted suffering, I don't condemn life.  On the contrary, I like it and find it good.  Can you believe it?  I find everything good and pleasant, even my tears, my grief.  I enjoy weeping, I enjoy my despair.  I enjoy being exasperated and sad.  I feel as if these were so many diversions, and I love life in spite of them all.  I want to live on.  It would be cruel to have me die when I am so accommodating.

 

I cry, I grieve, and at the same time I am pleased--no, not exactly that--I know not how to express it.  But everything in life pleases me.  I find everything agreeable, and in the very midst of my prayers for happiness, I find myself happy at being miserable.  It is not I who undergo all this--my body weeps and cries; but something inside of me which is above me is glad of it all." [37]  

 

[37] Journal de Marie Bashkirtseff, i. 67.

 

 

 

The supreme contemporary example of such an inability to feel evil is of course Walt Whitman.

 

"His favorite occupation," writes his disciple, Dr. Bucke "seemed to be strolling or sauntering about outdoors by himself, looking at the grass, the trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the varying aspects of the sky, and listening to the birds, the crickets, the tree frogs, and all the hundreds of natural sounds.

 

It was evident that these things gave him a pleasure far beyond what they give to ordinary people.  Until I knew the man," continues Dr. Bucke, "it had not occurred to me that any one could derive so much absolute happiness from these things as he did.  He was very fond of flowers, either wild or cultivated; liked all sorts.  I think he admired lilacs and sunflowers just as much as roses.  Perhaps, indeed, no man who ever lived liked so many things and disliked so few as Walt Whitman.  All natural objects seemed to have a charm for him.  All sights and sounds seemed to please him.  He appeared to like (and I believe he did like) all the men, women, and children he saw (though I never knew him to say that he liked any one), but each who knew him felt that he liked him or her, and that he liked others also.  I never knew him to argue or dispute, and he never spoke about money.  He always justified, sometimes playfully, sometimes quite seriously, those who spoke harshly of himself or his writings, and I often thought he even took pleasure in the opposition of enemies.  When I first knew [him], I used to think that he watched himself, and would not allow his tongue to give expression to fretfulness, antipathy, complaint, and remonstrance.  It did not occur to me as possible that these mental states could be absent in him.  After long observation, however, I satisfied myself that such absence or unconsciousness was entirely real.  He never spoke deprecatingly of any nationality or class of men, or time in the world's history, or against any trades or occupations--not even against any animals, insects, or inanimate things, nor any of the laws of nature, nor any of the results of those laws, such as illness, deformity, and death.  He never complained or grumbled either at the weather, pain, illness, or anything else.  He never swore.  He could not very well, since he never spoke in anger and apparently never was angry.  He never exhibited fear, and I do not believe he ever felt it."[38]

 

[38] R. M. Bucke:  Cosmic consciousness, pp. 182-186, abridged.

 

 

 

Walt Whitman owes his importance in literature to the systematic expulsion from his writings of all contractile elements.  The only sentiments he allowed himself to express were of the expansive order; and he expressed these in the first person, not as your mere monstrously conceited individual might so express them, but vicariously for all men, so that a passionate and mystic ontological emotion suffuses his words, and ends by persuading the reader that men and women, life and death, and all things are divinely good.

 

Thus it has come about that many persons to-day regard Walt Whitman as the restorer of the eternal natural religion. He has infected them with his own love of comrades, with his own gladness that he and they exist.  Societies are actually formed for his cult; a periodical organ exists for its propagation, in which the lines of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are already beginning to be drawn;[39] hymns are written by others in his peculiar prosody; and he is even explicitly compared with the founder of the Christian religion, not altogether to the advantage of the latter.

 

[39] I refer to The Conservator, edited by Horace Traubel, and published monthly at Philadelphia.

 

 

 

Whitman is often spoken of as a "pagan."  The word nowadays means sometimes the mere natural animal man without a sense of sin; sometimes it means a Greek or Roman with his own peculiar religious consciousness.  In neither of these senses does it fitly define this poet.  He is more than your mere animal man who has not tasted of the tree of good and evil.  He is aware enough of sin for a swagger to be present in his indifference towards it, a conscious pride in his freedom from flexions and contractions, which your genuine pagan in the first sense of the word would never show.     "I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and        self-contained,     I stand and look at them long and long;   They do not sweat and whine about their condition.   They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.   Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of

 

    owning things,   Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands

 

     of years ago,   Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth."[40]

 

[40] Song of Myself, 32.

 

 

 

No natural pagan could have written these well-known lines.  But on the other hand Whitman is less than a Greek or Roman; for their consciousness, even in Homeric times, was full to the brim of the sad mortality of this sunlit world, and such a consciousness Walt Whitman resolutely refuses to adopt.  When, for example, Achilles, about to slay Lycaon, Priam's young son, hears him sue for mercy, he stops to say:--

 

"Ah, friend, thou too must die:  why thus lamentest thou? Patroclos too is dead, who was better far than thou. . . . Over me too hang death and forceful fate.  There cometh morn or eve or some noonday when my life too some man shall take in battle, whether with spear he smite, or arrow from the string."[41]

 

[41] Iliad, XXI., E. Myers's translation.

 

 

 

Then Achilles savagely severs the poor boy's neck with his sword, heaves him by the foot into the Scamander, and calls to the fishes of the river to eat the white fat of Lycaon.  Just as here the cruelty and the sympathy each ring true, and do not mix or interfere with one another, so did the Greeks and Romans keep all their sadnesses and gladnesses unmingled and entire.  Instinctive good they did not reckon sin; nor had they any such desire to save the credit of the universe as to make them insist, as so many of US insist, that what immediately appears as evil must be "good in the making," or something equally ingenious.  Good was good, and bad just bad, for the earlier Greeks.  They neither denied the ills of nature--Walt Whitman's verse, "What is called good is perfect and what is called bad is just as perfect," would have been mere silliness to them--nor did they, in order to escape from those ills, invent "another and a better world" of the imagination, in which, along with the ills, the innocent goods of sense would also find no place.  This integrity of the instinctive reactions, this freedom from all moral sophistry and strain, gives a pathetic dignity to ancient pagan feeling. And this quality Whitman's outpourings have not got. His optimism is too voluntary and defiant; his gospel has a touch of bravado and an affected twist,[42] and this diminishes its effect on many readers who yet are well disposed towards optimism, and on the whole quite willing to admit that in important respects Whitman is of the genuine lineage of the prophets.

 

[42] "God is afraid of me!" remarked such a titanic-optimistic friend in my presence one morning when he was feeling particularly hearty and cannibalistic.  The defiance of the phrase showed that a Christian education in humility still rankled in his breast.

 

 

 

If, then, we give the name of healthy-mindedness to the tendency which looks on all things and sees that they are good, we find that we must distinguish between a more involuntary and a more voluntary or systematic way of being healthy-minded.  In its involuntary variety, healthy-mindedness is a way of feeling happy about things immediately.  In its systematical variety, it is an abstract way of conceiving things as good.  Every abstract way of conceiving things selects some one aspect of them as their essence for the time being, and disregards the other aspects.  Systematic healthy-mindedness, conceiving good as the essential and universal aspect of being, deliberately excludes evil from its field of vision; and although, when thus nakedly stated, this might seem a difficult feat to perform for one who is intellectually sincere with himself and honest about facts, a little reflection shows that the situation is too complex to lie open to so simple a criticism.

 

In the first place, happiness, like every other emotional state, has blindness and insensibility to opposing facts given it as its instinctive weapon for self-protection against disturbance. When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules.  To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in.  He must ignore it; and to the bystander he may then seem perversely to shut his eyes to it and hush it up.

 

But more than this:  the hushing of it up may, in a perfectly candid and honest mind, grow into a deliberate religious policy, or parti pris.  Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon.  It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight; its sting so often departs and turns into a relish when, after vainly seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and bear it cheerfully, that a man is simply bound in honor, with reference to many of the facts that seem at first to disconcert his peace, to adopt this way of escape.  Refuse to admit their badness; despise their power; ignore their presence; turn your attention the other way; and so far as you yourself are concerned at any rate, though the facts may still exist, their evil character exists no longer.  Since you make them evil or good by your own thoughts about them, it is the ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern.

 

The deliberate adoption of an optimistic turn of mind thus makes its entrance into philosophy.  And once in, it is hard to trace its lawful bounds.  Not only does the human instinct for happiness, bent on self-protection by ignoring, keep working in its favor, but higher inner ideals have weighty words to say.  The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly.  What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others?  What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty?  It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation.  At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance.  But it is impossible to carry on this discipline in the subjective sphere without zealously emphasizing the brighter and minimizing the darker aspects of the objective sphere of things at the same time.  And thus our resolution not to indulge in misery, beginning at a comparatively small point within ourselves, may not stop until it has brought the entire frame of reality under a systematic conception optimistic enough to be congenial with its needs.

 

In all this I say nothing of any mystical insight or persuasion that the total frame of things absolutely must be good.  Such mystical persuasion plays an enormous part in the history of the religious consciousness, and we must look at it later with some care.  But we need not go so far at present. More ordinary non-mystical conditions of rapture suffice for my immediate contention.  All invasive moral states and passionate enthusiasms make one feelingless to evil in some direction. The common penalties cease to deter the patriot, the usual prudences are flung by the lover to the winds.  When the passion is extreme, suffering may actually be gloried in, provided it be for the ideal cause, death may lose its sting, the grave its victory.  In these states, the ordinary contrast of good and ill seems to be swallowed up in a higher denomination, an omnipotent excitement which engulfs the evil, and which the human being welcomes as the crowning experience of his life.  This, he says, is truly to live, and I exult in the heroic opportunity and adventure.

 

The systematic cultivation of healthy-mindedness as a religious attitude is therefore consonant with important currents in human nature, and is anything but absurd.  In fact. we all do cultivate it more or less, even when our professed theology should in consistency forbid it.  We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; and the slaughter-houses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world that really is.[43]

 

[43] "As I go on in this life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing, the commonest things are a burthen. The prim, obliterated, polite surface of life, and the broad, bawdy and orgiastic--or maenadic--foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me.  R. L. Stevenson:  Letters, ii. 355.

 

 

 

The advance of liberalism, so-called, in Christianity, during the past fifty years, may fairly be called a victory of healthy-mindedness within the church over the morbidness with which the old hell-fire theology was more harmoniously related.  We have now whole congregations whose preachers, far from magnifying our consciousness of sin, seem devoted rather to making little of it.  They ignore, or even deny, eternal punishment, and insist on the dignity rather than on the depravity of man.  They look at the continual preoccupation of the old-fashioned Christian with the salvation of his soul as something sickly and reprehensible rather than admirable; and a sanguine and "muscular" attitude. which to our forefathers would have seemed purely heathen, has become in their eyes an ideal element of Christian character. I am not asking whether or not they are right, I am only pointing out the change.  The persons to whom I refer have still retained for the most part their nominal connection with Christianity, in spite of their discarding of its more pessimistic theological elements.  But in that "theory of evolution" which, gathering momentum for a century, has within the past twenty-five years swept so rapidly over Europe and America, we see the ground laid for a new sort of religion of Nature, which has entirely displaced Christianity from the thought of a large part of our generation.  The idea of a universal evolution lends itself to a doctrine of general meliorism and progress which fits the religious needs of the healthy-minded so well that it seems almost as if it might have been created for their use.  Accordingly we find "evolutionism" interpreted thus optimistically and embraced as a substitute for the religion they were born in, by a multitude of our contemporaries who have either been trained scientifically, or been fond of reading popular science, and who had already begun to be inwardly dissatisfied with what seemed to them the harshness and irrationality of the orthodox Christian scheme.  As examples are better than descriptions, I will quote a document received in answer to Professor Starbuck's circular of questions.

 

The writer's state of mind may by courtesy be called a religion, for it is his reaction on the whole nature of things, it is systematic and reflective and it loyally binds him to certain inner ideals.  I think you will recognize in him, coarse-meated and incapable of wounded spirit as he is, a sufficiently familiar contemporary type.

 

 Q.  What does Religion mean to you?

 

A.  It means nothing; and it seems, so far as I can observe useless to others.  I am sixty-seven years of age and have resided in X fifty years, and have been in business forty-five, consequently I have some little experience of life and men, and some women too, and I find that the most religious and pious people are as a rule those most lacking in uprightness and morality. 

 

The men who do not go to church or have any religious convictions are the best.  Praying, singing of hymns, and sermonizing are pernicious--they teach us to rely on some supernatural power, when we ought to rely on ourselves.  I TEEtotally disbelieve in a God.  The God-idea was begotten in ignorance, fear, and a general lack of any knowledge of Nature.  If I were to die now, being in a healthy condition for my age, both mentally and physically, I would just as lief, yes, rather, die with a hearty enjoyment of music, sport, or any other rational pastime. As a timepiece stops, we die--there being no immortality in either case.

 

 Q.  What comes before your mind corresponding to the words God, Heaven, Angels, etc?

 

A.  Nothing whatever.  I am a man without a religion.  These words mean so much mythic bosh.

 

 Q.  Have you had any experiences which appeared providential?

 

A.  None whatever.  There is no agency of the superintending kind.  A little judicious observation as well as knowledge of scientific law will convince any one of this fact.

 

 Q.  What things work most strongly on your emotions?

 

A.  Lively songs and music; Pinafore instead of an Oratorio. I like Scott, Burns, Byron, Longfellow, especially Shakespeare, etc., etc.  Of songs, the Star-Spangled Banner, America, Marseillaise, and all moral and soul-stirring songs, but wishy-washy hymns are my detestation.  I greatly enjoy nature, especially fine weather, and until within a few years used to walk Sundays into the country, twelve miles often, with no fatigue, and bicycle forty or fifty.  I have dropped the bicycle.

 

I never go to church, but attend lectures when there are any good ones.  All of my thoughts and cogitations have been of a healthy and cheerful kind, for instead of doubts and fears I see things as they are, for I endeavor to adjust myself to my environment.  This I regard as the deepest law.  Mankind is a progressive animal.  I am satisfied he will have made a great advance over his present status a thousand years hence.

 

 Q.  What is your notion of sin?

 

A.  It seems to me that sin is a condition, a disease, incidental to man's development not being yet advanced enough.  Morbidness   over it increases the disease.  We should think that a million of years hence equity, justice, and mental and physical good order will be so fixed and organized that no one will have any idea of evil or sin.

 

 Q.  What is your temperament?

 

A.  Nervous, active, wide-awake, mentally and physically. Sorry that Nature compels us to sleep at all.

 

 If we are in search of a broken and a contrite heart, clearly we need not look to this brother.  His contentment with the finite incases him like a lobster-shell and shields him from all morbid repining at his distance from the infinite.  We have in him an excellent example of the optimism which may be encouraged by popular science.

 

 To my mind a current far more important and interesting religiously than that which sets in from natural science towards healthy-mindedness is that which has recently poured over America and seems to be gathering force every day--I am ignorant what foothold it may yet have acquired in Great Britain--and to which, for the sake of having a brief designation, I will give the title of the "Mind-cure movement."  There are various sects of this "New Thought," to use another of the names by which it calls itself; but their agreements are so profound that their differences may be neglected for my present purpose, and I will treat the movement, without apology, as if it were a simple thing.

 

It is a deliberately optimistic scheme of life, with both a speculative and a practical side.  In its gradual development during the last quarter of a century, it has taken up into itself a number of contributory elements, and it must now be reckoned with as a genuine religious power.  It has reached the stage, for example, when the demand for its literature is great enough for insincere stuff, mechanically produced for the market, to be to a certain extent supplied by publishers--a phenomenon never observed, I imagine, until a religion has got well past its earliest insecure beginnings.

 

One of the doctrinal sources of Mind-cure is the four Gospels; another is Emersonianism or New England transcendentalism; another is Berkeleyan idealism; another is spiritism, with its messages of "law" and "progress" and "development"; another the optimistic popular science evolutionism of which I have recently spoken; and, finally, Hinduism has contributed a strain.  But the most characteristic feature of the mind-cure movement is an inspiration much more direct.  The leaders in this faith have had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously precautionary states of mind.[44] Their belief has in a general way been corroborated by the practical experience of their disciples; and this experience forms to-day a mass imposing in amount.

 

[44] "Cautionary Verses for Children":  this title of a much used work, published early in the nineteenth century, shows how far the muse of evangelical protestantism in England, with her mind fixed on the idea of danger, had at last drifted away from the original gospel freedom.  Mind-cure might be briefly called a reaction against all that religion of chronic anxiety which marked the earlier part of our century in the evangelical circles of England and America.

 

 

 

The blind have been made to see, the halt to walk; life-long invalids have had their health restored.  The moral fruits have been no less remarkable.  The deliberate adoption of a healthy-minded attitude has proved possible to many who never supposed they had it in them; regeneration of character has gone on on an extensive scale; and cheerfulness has been restored to countless homes.  The indirect influence of this has been great.  The mind-cure principles are beginning so to pervade the air that one catches their spirit at second-hand.  One hears of the "Gospel of Relaxation," of the "Don't Worry Movement," of people who repeat to themselves, "Youth, health, vigor!" when dressing in the morning, as their motto for the day. 

 

Complaints of the weather are getting to be forbidden in many households; and more and more people are recognizing it to be bad form to speak of disagreeable sensations, or to make much of the ordinary inconveniences and ailments of life.  These general tonic effects on public opinion would be good even if the more striking results were non-existent.  But the latter abound so that we can afford to overlook the innumerable failures and self-deceptions that are mixed in with them (for in everything human failure is a matter of course), and we can also overlook the verbiage of a good deal of the mind-cure literature, some of which is so moonstruck with optimism and so vaguely expressed that an academically trained intellect finds it almost impossible to read it at all.

 

The plain fact remains that the spread of the movement has been due to practical fruits, and the extremely practical turn of character of the American people has never been better shown than by the fact that this, their only decidedly original contribution to the systematic philosophy of life, should be so intimately knit up with concrete therapeutics.  To the importance of mind-cure the medical and clerical