Religion on its earthward side is a mighty and sustained enterprise of the human spirit, whose aims and methods lie open to observation equally with those of Politics, Art and Morals, and which similarly invites a judgment upon the measure of visible success or failure that has been achieved in the pursuit of its declared ends. At the outset of such a study, it is natural to fix attention on the human subject that has cultivated relations with the divine being, and to examine the equipment which man has brought to the task, and the experiences in which his spiritual gains have been realised. This investigation is the task of the Psychology of Religion, which during the last quarter of a century has enjoyed an extraordinary vogue, not only because of the peculiar features of the religious phenomena, but also because of the high expectations which the investigation has raised. For the inquiry has been welcomed equally by those who are in search of additional supports for their faith, and by those who think it would be for the good of mankind if the religious view of existence could be finally discredited as a morbid, a useless and an expensive hypothesis.

In an informing survey of the literature, Professor Oesterreich speaks of the Psychology of Religion as a new Science which dates from the publication of James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, and which had a harbinger in Starbuck’s analysis of the material that he elicited by his questionnaire from a select list of serious-minded American citizens.1 He adds that there is no reason to be surprised if America has made an important contribution to Theology, since it has always reserved some space in its heart alongside of its Mammon-worship for vital piety and moral ideals. The actual state of things is that former ages made large contributions to the Psychology of Religion by the collection and interpretation of its data, and that the modern discipline has made copious additions to the materials, and introduced a simplified and secularised method. The literature of Buddhism contains a very elaborate system of Psychology. The Scriptural data are of such compass that for more than a century Biblical Psychology has a recognised place in the Theological Encyclopaedia as one of the sub-divisions of Biblical Science. Protestant Theology has specially cultivated the doctrines of Subjective Soteriology, which consist of affirmations concerning the genesis, the development and the content of the Christian experience. The method of Schleiermacher was to extract from experience the subject-matter of a system of Christian doctrine, and to re-edit the particular doctrines of the Protestant tradition with the help of a purely subjective criterion. The innovation is that, while Theology worked with a combination of observation and dogmatism, the modern Psychology of Religion has discarded theological presuppositions, and operates exclusively with the postulates and the axioms of Empirical Science. This antithesis may be exhibited in the three main particulars.

In the first place, Theology had recognised, and the Psychology of Religion does not recognise, a didactic authority. While the former bowed before the authority of the Scriptures or of the Church as settling the most important questions in the field, Psychology relies as a matter of course on the evidence that can be collected by observation and testimony, and possibly experiment, and proceeds to draw its own conclusions. Doubtless it was not unheard of in Theology to practise introspection, and to describe the religious states on the basis of first-hand observation. St. Paul gives a somewhat elaborate scheme of religious Psychology; and this was obtained, not so much from a study of the Hebrew Scriptures, as by an analysis of the content of his life in the Spirit, and by reflection on the successive stages through which he had passed. The Christian theologians who formulated the Christian doctrines of Anthropology and Soteriology looked with their own eyes into the differences between the regenerate soul and the natural man. At the same time, it was generally held that the crowning task of the theologian in this field was to reproduce the teaching relevant to spiritual states and processes which could be collected from the records of Revelation, or which had been authoritatively formulated in ecclesiastical dogma. Jonathan Edwards was no mean psychological observer, but in the Treatise concerning Religious Affections it is his exposition of the Scriptural proof which invariably forms the staple of a positive or a critical argument.

The second distinctive feature of the scientific work was that it was descriptive—not judicial or normative. The theologian’s judgments of value were replaced by observations and generalisations as to matters of fact. While the theologian’s chief concern was to distinguish the experiences accompanying salvation from those of a shallow or fictitious piety, the psychologist approached them sine studio et ira, and even welcomed variety as an enrichment of the subject-matter of his Science. The theological attitude was like that of a farmer who should give a rough classification of the creatures on his holding as valuable, worthless and noxious, and perhaps proceed to declare that his cattle were his real wealth, and to complain of vermin and pests; while the empirical standpoint would be represented by the biologist who found the sheep as interesting as the cattle, the vermin perhaps more interesting than either, and the garden all the richer because the bushes and the fruit-trees were infested by many species of injurious insects. The old Protestant theologians were well aware that there are many varieties of religious experience, but they took no pleasure in those which diverged from the evangelical pattern, while the task of the scientific investigator was merely to analyse and describe the classic form of conversion, and to place alongside of it other modes of thought and feeling, which, however their spiritual value might be appraised, had at least an equal claim to be treated with respect in their character of mental states and events.

The third and most characteristic feature of the modern discipline is the limitation which it prescribes in the matter of causal explanation. It shares in the modern passion for genetic treatment—for adding, that is, to the description of what anything is and does, information or speculation as to how it came to be; and in discharging this task it has restricted itself as a matter of course to the recognition of those factors which belong to the system of natural are causes. Christian Theology, it is true, recognised that there are energies and influences operating in the spiritual sphere which have the same kind of efficiency that is ascribed in other realms to the machinery of natural causation. The influence of teaching and example, and above all of heredity, was very strongly emphasised when it was sought to explain the facts of human sinfulness. The systems of Christian Doctrine also contained a section which, under the rubric of the means of grace, dealt with factors that to some extent operated as secondary causes in the spiritual life. From the theological point of view, however, it was felt to be necessary to a real explanation that spiritual effects should be traced back to the supernatural factor of divine grace or the operations of the Holy Spirit. From the psychological point of view, on the other hand, to have recourse to the factor of divine agency is tantamount to the abandonment of the attempt at explanation. In the debate on the origin of religion, for example, the conditions of a scientific explanation were met by the theory that religion began through men taking their dreams too seriously, or imagining that they had seen ghosts, or cherishing a wish which was the spring of vain imaginations, or even doing some elementary reasoning; but it was not permissible to argue for the old thesis that the impulse to worship proceeded from a primeval special revelation, or that the Holy Spirit awakened in the finite creature the consciousness of his dependence on, and his kinship with, a God in whom he lives and moves and has his being. Pelagius would have been held to be in order because, although he attributed his religious experience to divine grace, it was explained that grace was only a name for the power of truth and the force of example; and Augustine would have been ruled out of court when he declared grace to be a supernatural energy that was infused into the soul out of the hidden deeps of the life of God. In thus rigorously confining itself to natural causality, the modern discipline is entirely within its rights: it may be said that in doing so it only sticks to its last, and rightly sticks to its last; but it still remains possible, and even probable, that the thoughts of God are wider than the measures of man’s mind, and that the realm of spiritual reality has not felt bound to respect the principles which govern a strictly scientific inquiry. In any case the Psychology of Religion, more, perhaps, than any other special science, leaves the impression that the purely empirical outlook gives a fragmentary view of the universe, and that it needs to be widened and rounded off by a spiritual philosophy.2

The initial task of Religious Psychology is to determine what is the proper subject of the religious experience, or at least to select the subject in which that experience is most characteristically revealed and most profitably studied. There is a choice, to begin with, between an individual subject, as presupposed in General Psychology, and a collective subject or human group, such as supplies the subject-matter of the modern discipline of Social Psychology. Further, there are three individual subjects whose claims have to be weighed, and there are at least two different groups for which precedence has been asserted. In each class of the subjects, individual and collective, a distinction has to be drawn between those for whom religion has a secondary though substantial interest, and those who make it their primary and dominating concern. The individual class contains at least three subjects which have made a prominent figure in religious history—the human being as such, to whom religion has been something, the convert, to whom it has been much, and the saint, to whom it has been everything. And there are two collective subjects which have been similarly distinguished. The first is the natural community of the tribe or nation, which has usually assigned to religion an importance that was at least co-ordinate with that of the weighty avocations and enterprises of the mundane sphere. The second is the sacred community or Church which has in religion the reason for its existence, and which has therefore naturally believed that the spiritual interests entrusted to its keeping were paramount, and has usually acted in accordance with this conviction. In the present lecture we shall touch on the general characteristics of each of these religious subjects, reserving for a later chapter the detailed examination of the intellectual powers and capacities which they have brought to bear in their apprehension of God and divine things.

I

1. The first of the individual subjects is the typical human being, regarded as the possessor of a religious nature and of a religious experience. It is no doubt difficult to discover the individual in the state of nature. The factors which make up his congenital endowment for religion are inseparably blended with the educative influences by which he has been served heir to the religious ideas and practices that are current in the society to which he owes birth and nurture. The study of the religion of the child sheds no great light on the matter, since the chief contribution of the child is to give back the ideas and impressions which he has been taught. Still less does the savage represent human nature in its primitive simplicity, for the savage is an almost unqualified product of tradition and custom, and his scheme of religious thought and practice is often in the highest degree artificial. At the same time, it is not open to doubt that man as man has constitutional religious characteristics of which some account can be given on the basis of comparative theology and of psychological observation. In the older treatises on general psychology, indeed, it was taken for granted that the materials were so scanty that they might be neglected—the index of William James’s Principles of Psychology does not contain a single reference to the religious endowment of man; but during the present century, and largely through the influence of James’s later investigations, the scientific analysis of mind has increasingly reflected man’s own estimate of the high importance of his religious life.

Man as man has a title to be regarded as a religious subject, were it only because of the universality of religious feeling. The elemental religious feeling, it has often been said, is fear, and the modern account given of its life-history is that this fear was blended with wonder and became awe, and that awe being joined with tender emotion, passed into reverence. It should, however, be added that fear, awe, and reverence, when called forth by a religious object, have a quality or tone which is markedly different from what is experienced when these emotions are evoked by objects of the secular order. The famous thesis of Schleiermacher was that the religious feeling which is common to man is unique in respect that it involves a sense of absolute dependence.3 While, however, it may be held that man ought to have such a feeling of absolute dependence, and while in pantheistic religion, and also under Islam and in Calvinism, it has been met with in almost uncompromising strength, the belief has also been widely prevalent that the relations of man and God are rather of the nature of an alliance or a scheme of co-operation. Professor Otto has contended that the specifically religious feeling, which he calls creaturely feeling, is a profound sense of the utter otherness of God—who is the mysterium tremendum, and of the nothingness of the human worshipper. The divine impresses man as the unapproachable, overwhelming in His majesty, terrible in His goings forth, wrapped in mystery; and in His presence the creature abhors himself, and counts himself dust and ashes.4 Here again it might be objected that the feeling has not been universal that the sacred and the profane are separated by an impassable gulf. While this holds of primitive thinking, the conception of the divine culminated in the paradox that God is not only astoundingly unlike to man and remote from man, but that He is also astoundingly like to him, and nearer to him than the body of flesh and blood. It is difficult, probably impossible, to determine the precise content and reference of religious feeling, but these attempts at least agree in supporting the view, which has also the general experience in its favour, that nothing stirs the heart in exactly the same way as does the presence and the thought of the divine.

The religious attitude characteristic of the normal individual has been much discussed in the theological schools, and opinion has varied widely as to the kind, the amount, and the value of the piety which can be credited to him as a representative of his species. In Christian Theology the question has been elaborately treated under the heads of the original state and the fallen condition of man; and the common doctrine has been that he has undergone a corruption of nature which has indisposed and disqualified him for communion with God, while in the Augustinian school this view has sometimes been pressed to the point of affirming that the natural man is so completely under the dominion of sin that the spirit of his life has become sheer hatred of God and opposition to His will. In contrast with this it was a tenet of the eighteenth-century illumination, illustrated in one of Voltaire’s romances, in which a North-American Indian figures as the censor of European impiety and vice, that man inherits a spirit of natural piety which is checked and repressed by the evil influences that are developed with the progress of civilisation. The truth lies between the two positions. Man as man is far from being irreligious, and it is certainly not natural to him to loathe God, and to organise his life as a deliberate warfare against God. The figure of Prometheus has excited his horror rather than his admiration, and he has not dreamed of recognising in it his own portrait. On the other hand, it is certain that he has no great natural endowment of the qualities which in the higher religions are reckoned to enter into true piety. While he is disposed to seek God, he is too heavily weighted by animal and selfish propensities to feel at home with a righteous and holy God. The normal human attitude has been defined by Otto in his observation that man has been at one and the same time fascinated and repelled by the divine.5 He has been drawn to God by expectation, duty, love and curiosity—doubtless also by more secret ties; but he has also fled from His presence under the sense of His awful majesty, and in the fear that He might break forth upon him as a ravening lion or as a consuming fire. These two aspects of the human attitude were noticed by the writer who, in the story of Jacob’s wrestling, pictured the patriarch as striving with God, and being smitten as an enemy, while yet he clave to Him as his friend, and would not let Him go until He blessed him. (Gen. xxxii. 24 ff.)

2. The second of the capital individual subjects is conveniently described as the convert. The great religions have been at one in teaching that man is by nature in an evil plight of ignorance, misery and peril, and they have consistently affirmed the necessity of enlightenment, of emancipation, and of regeneration. The convert, understood in a wide sense, is one who has so responded to the demands and promises of his religion that his character has been profoundly modified, and that its principles and laws have come to govern the general tenour of his life and conduct. The instruments employed for conversion have been in the main three—the preaching of a gospel, education and training, and sacred rites of the sacramental kind which serve as channels of grace. These methods have been combined in practice, though with persistent conflict of theory as to how much efficacy was to be attributed to each in the production of the desired type of character, the reinforcement of its vitality, and the quickening of its powers. The universal religions have had different degrees of success in the attempt to re-fashion the raw material of humanity after the pattern of their ideals; and it is not surprising if Christianity, which has promised an essentially spiritual salvation and which has conjoined its promises with the sternest demands, has also had the largest measure of apparent failure. It may not, however, be overlooked that beneath the stratum which can be fairly described as a converted or re-made humanity, there is a very large and important class of the Christian Church which can be called leavened, and which may with equal justice be described as a partial spiritual success and as a partial failure. The authentic converts—those who, as tested by their dominant convictions and principles, represent a real remodelling of the human material after a higher pattern—represent many degrees of attainment. In particular, there is a recognisable hall-mark of the converts of the periods of origin, reformation and revival, and another shown by those of the later generations who are in the main the products of education and training, and whose conversion substantially consists in the fact that they reproduce the general lineaments of the type of religious and moral character that is the respectable product of the diffused spiritual influence of a historic religious community.

As the chief aim of the great religions, and notably of Christianity, has been to produce the regenerate man, they have naturally had much to say about conversion, the stages of sanctification, and the means by which the spiritual results are achieved. The topics of the second birth and the stages of the new life bulk largely in the higher religions of India. Jesus required a change of heart—which meant much more than repentance as popularly understood, implying as it did that the disciple was to be a man of a new order, who would love and trust God as the heavenly Father, who in comparison with the things of the Kingdom would hold cheaply the goods of wealth and honour that men naturally prize as the best things in life, and whose dealings with his fellow-men, and even with strangers and enemies, would be inspired by love, meekness and clemency. The Pauline and the Johannine literature throw into bold relief the necessity of regeneration, and at the same time magnify the work of God in effecting the change. In Theology the subject has been very fully treated under the rubric of Subjective Soteriology, which includes the topics of faith, repentance, regeneration, sanctification and the mystical union. And most recently the American School has fastened on the convert as the most instructive if not also the most important of the religious subjects.6

Conversion is a very large and a very complex phenomenon. A complete treatment would embrace the following points:—(1) the general conditions under which conversion takes place, and the means by which it is effected; (2) the duration of the process, as illustrated in the distinction of the sudden and the gradual conversion; (3) the varieties of the faith which is the normal presupposition of conversion, distinguished by reference to the strength of the faith and the grounds on which it rests; (4) the nature of the blessings appropriated, with a comparative view of the way in which the content of the experience has varied in the great religions, and specially in the chief divisions of the Christian Church; (5) the effects following upon the experience of the radical change; (6) the explanations of the experience that have been given by the converts themselves, and by the theological and scientific schools. At present we confine our attention to the topics of the content and the origin of the conversion-experience.

(a) It is one of the services of the modern Psychology of Religion that it has brought to light the variety of the satisfactions experienced in conversion. In the traditional scheme of Protestant Theology it was agreed to recognise as typical the conversion which had its prototype in the spiritual history of Augustine and Luther, and which had been reproduced in its essential features in revered figures of the evangelical school. The cardinal boons were conceived as deliverance from the guilt of sin—described from different points of view as justification, forgiveness of sins, reconciliation, adoption; and deliverance from the power of sin—begun on earth in the form of a progressive sanctification, and destined to be completed in the state of glory. There were also secondary blessings which were recognised as proceeding and flowing from the new religious relationship and the new spiritual condition—a well-known list being assurance of God’s love, peace of conscience, joy in the Holy Ghost, increase of grace, and perseverance therein to the end. Starbuck’s investigation made it appear that what is still ordinarily sought and found by the convert within the pale of Protestant Christianity can be described in terms of one or other or both of the fundamental blessings. In his table of ‘the motives and forces present at conversion,’ he reports that 14 per cent, testified that they were influenced by the fear of death or hell, 16 per cent, that they were impelled by remorse, conviction for sin, etc., and these two groups, amounting to 30 per cent., may be combined as witnessing to the experience that deliverance from the guilt of sin (including its penalties) is the essence of the Christian salvation. The converts, given as 22 per cent., who declared that they had been actuated by a desire to follow out a moral ideal, used a formula which gave expression to the experience that this salvation consists essentially in deliverance from the power of sin. The self-regarding motives other than those connected with fear and remorse were returned at the low figure of 6 per cent., and the other altruistic motives, which might perhaps be subsumed under the impulse towards sanctification, only numbered 5 per cent.7

The following table was designed to bring out ‘in what conversion consists’:

The table is far from being a model of method and classification, and it does not fully bring out what was the chief gain. Many of the persons interrogated must have belonged to several classes, and the percentages are in consequence unreliable. It is as if an inquiry were made as to what had been the experiences of some hundreds of persons who had been saved after shipwreck, and a report was issued to the effect that 24 per cent. stated that they had been rescued when helpless and unconscious, 16 per cent. that they had suffered no bad effects, 16 per cent. that they attended a service of thanksgiving, 14 per cent. that they rejoined their friends, 13 per cent. that they gave up struggling when in the water and left it to others to save them, 9 per cent. that they swam ashore, 8 per cent. that they were helped to keep afloat by a lifebelt. They could no doubt be arranged in different classes according to the way in which they had escaped drowning, but the members of these classes would also have to be counted over again in one or more of the classes which testified that they were none the worse, or were restored to their friends, and some of them would also be able to say that they had taken part in the religious service. Further, the table makes a disappointingly meagre report as to what the converts conceived to be the content of the salvation which they had received. The persons giving evidence on this important point are only represented by two groups, making up 30 per cent. of the whole, and both belong to the class for which the essence of salvation consists in deliverance from the guilt of sin realised either as forgiveness or as union with God. A greater variety of experience would doubtless have been revealed at this point if the witnesses had been more fully interrogated, but the inference may also be drawn that the latter-day convert is an inferior religious subject, whose testimony as to the content of the conversion-experience needs to be richly supplemented from historical and biographical sources.

The manifoldness of the content had previously been emphasised by Höffding,9 who, on the basis of a comparative view of the history of religious experience, suggested a list of six fundamental types. He describes them as varieties of religious faith, but his types actually fall into two well-marked groups —according as they exemplify varieties of faith, or varieties of the blessings appropriated by faith. The kinds of faith which he distinguishes are confident boldness and the faith which rests on authority. The spiritual values distinguished as the special possession of different types are four—rest, self-development, a satisfying view of things as a whole and the spirit of resignation. The type of confident boldness, which Höffding illustrates by the faith of Luther, stands in a way for the evangelical experience of deliverance from guilt; the self-development type may be held to represent the experience of deliverance from the power of sin; and he made the important addition of recognising the two types whose chief impulse has been the desire for rest and the need of intellectual satisfaction, and a third by which resignation has been valued as the highest achievement of the spiritual life. On the other hand, the list is not too well arranged, and it is also defective. The distinctive evangelical experience is very inadequately described by a reference to the boldness of the faith which has accompanied it. It may also be observed that resignation is only one aspect of a general attitude which has found the highest good in conformity with the divine will, and which has combined the passive grace of resignation with the active grace of obedience to the positive requirements of God. To the list of fundamental types there falls to be added the emotional type of piety, commonly known as Mysticism, which has found its deepest satisfaction, as well as its strongest justification, in a love of God that is felt to be its own reward. The truth is that the motives leading to conversion, and the elements entering into the content of the experience, have been connected with every deep-seated need and aspiration which serve as a normal and constant spring of the higher forms of human endeavour. Could we collect evidence from the universal company of those who have undergone a transformation that was entitled to be called a conversion, the collective testimony would be to the effect that the experience had distributed among them, at the least in the shape of earnest and promise, and in transfigured form, every kind of good which human nature desires, had stirred their deepest feelings to an accompaniment, if not of happiness, at least of peace of mind, had held their wills captive in a welcome servitude, and had flooded their universe, that had lain in darkness and under the shadow of death, with a bright and abiding light. There would also be evidence to the effect that the types which scientific analysis puts asunder have often been joined together in the concrete synthesis of character and life. Four of the types mentioned by Höffding, to take a conspicuous example, coalesced in the experience of Paul, who found in Christianity a salvation which, while bringing rest and self-development, with humble resignation to the will of God, also satisfied the needs of the mind by giving him a satisfying view of the totality of things and of man’s place in the universe, and which, lest somewhat should yet be lacking, contained the assurance that all things were his, even as he was Christ’s, and Christ was God’s (1 Cor. iii. 22–23).

(b) The testimony of the converts, besides emphasising the variety of the blessings, has been given somewhat decisively on the question of their origin. They have generally rejected the notion that the change was attributable to self-effort, and have explained it as the effect of divine influence or a supernatural principle of grace. The four marks of conversion given by Professor Coe are that it is a profound change, that it affects the attitudes which constitute the character and mode of life, that it involves emancipation or enlargement of the self, and that it seems not to be wrought by the subject but upon him.10 It may at least be said that the conviction that conversion is not self-wrought has been that of the majority of those who have known the experience. There are three views as to the causal explanation which can be traced throughout the history of the higher religions—that the experience is exclusively the work of God, that it is due to cooperation between man and God, and that in it man works out his own salvation. The relation of the human will to the divine was much discussed in Hindu Schools, where the first two of the explanations have been picturesquely distinguished as the ‘cat-hold theory,’ and the ‘monkey theory.’ According to the former view ‘a man has no more part in his salvation than the helpless kitten which the mother seizes by the nape of the neck,’ while the latter represents him’ as the baby monkey which, when its mother takes it up to carry it to a place of safety, hangs on with all the strength of its little arms.’11 The theory of salvation by self-effort was represented by Buddhism, and by those philosophical schools in which Pantheism passed over into Atheism. In the Christian Church the same three theories have been in frequent conflict under the names of Augustinianism, Semi-Pelagianism, and Pelagianism. There has also been an observable uniformity in the matter of their succession and ascendency, the doctrine of the exclusive efficacy of grace being congenial to the ages that were supported by elemental religious fervour, the doctrine of co-operation being favoured in the secondary periods, while the theory that man saves himself has prevailed in decadent periods in which there has been least evidence that he was accomplishing the task. This cycle of thought has been traversed four times—first from Paul by way of the Greek fathers to Pelagius; a second time from Augustine by way of the Scholastics to the Humanists of the Renaissance; a third time from the Reformers by way of Arminianism and Socianism to the Deists of the eighteenth century; and lastly from the Evangelical Revival, with its earnest re-assertion of the Augustinian doctrines of grace, by way of the Synergism of modern Theology, to the confident Pelagianism of the many voices which have been raised in Philosophy and Psychology against the religious hypothesis of the ‘psychological miracle.’ It may also be observed that the Christian society has not only felt a renewed assurance of the reality of the subjective miracle whenever its spiritual life has been revived, but that whenever its judgment has been expressly challenged it has repudiated the Pelagian explanation, and has demanded that the Semi-Pelagian type of thought should be kept within narrow limits. It would also appear that this finding has been endorsed by the general body of converts. On this point Starbuck’s evidence is of interest. The most valuable part of the table which was quoted is that which distinguishes the various attitudes of the will in conversion, and it goes to show that the types of explanation which have made so great a figure in Church history have a permanent basis in the impressions which converts form as to what is due to divine influence and how much to themselves. Two of Starbuck’s groups testified to a spontaneous awakening or self-surrender, and these, who may be combined in a non-volitional class, had the experience which forms the basis of the Augustinian tenets of prevenient and irresistible grace. A second class, which testified to a sense of divine aid, and a third, which declared that the experience followed upon conscious self-determination, might be counted as elucidating, one the Semi-Pelagian, the other the Pelagian position. The figures given are, for the combined non-volitional class, 37 per cent., for the synergistic, 8 per cent., for the purely volitional, 9 per cent.; and as in this case the calculations may be thought trustworthy, they show that there is popular support for the historic judgment of the Church as to the merits of the three classic types of explanation. The Church has dogmatically affirmed that the experience of regeneration is the result of an infusion of supernatural life and power; and it is remarkable that in a religious age which cannot be rated on the spiritual side as more than commonplace, it should still appear that the majority of those who have first-hand acquaintance with the matter have the conviction that the experience in which the soul finds God, and which is the starting-point of a higher life, is one which is effected, not by a subject who rallies the good in the depths of himself, but by a divine power by which he has been apprehended, moulded and transformed.

3. The saint may be defined in general terms as the utterly consecrated and devoted personality. If the convert, even when one-sided and immature, can claim esteem as so far an authentic and valuable spiritual product, the saint embodies the ideals and the spirit of a religion in a degree that approaches or satisfies its standard of perfection. Every religion has paid unique honour to those who are regarded as the ripest fruits or the chosen seed of its spiritual life, and the names given in many languages to the members of this highest class have been held to be roughly equivalent to the term saint, with which the Christian Church has honoured those who have walked closely with God and have been filled with His fulness.12 James emphasised the family likeness of saints of all creeds, and offered ‘a composite photograph of universal saintliness.’ His list of the common features is as follows:—’ (1) A feeling of being in a wider life than that of this world’s selfish little interests, and a conviction, not merely intellectual but as it were sensible, of the existence of an ideal power; (2) a sense of the friendly continuity of the ideal power with our own life and a willing self-surrender to its control; (3) an immense elation and freedom as the outlines of the confining selfhood melt down; (4) a shifting of the emotional centre towards loving and harmonious affections, towards “yes, yes,” and away from “no, no,” where the claims of the non-ego are concerned.’13 He adds as consequential features asceticism, strength of soul, purity and charity. This description of the marks of the saints might be reduced to a more systematic form: (a) attributes of piety—sense of the presence and of the love of God (2^a); (b) emotional experiences—joy (3^a), and peace (4^b); (c) attributes of virtue—self-abnegation (4^C), devotion or obedience (2^b), liberty (3^b) and love (4^A). This conception of the saint is, however, too wide for a universal application. The Confucian saint, the sèng jên, was a sage who reached a high Standard of mundane virtue, but whose relations with the divine could be confined to the observance of certain religious rites in accordance with the customs of his fathers. The primitive Buddhist saint exemplified self-surrender and obedience in a pre-eminent degree; but even when the idea of God is construed, as by James, in the most elastic fashion, it is impossible to credit him with the sense of the ‘friendly continuity of the ideal’ power which enters into the substance of his notion of saintliness. The truth is not only that an elevated idea of God is a presupposition of a sainthood worthy of the name, but that the content of the idea has vitally determined the saintly character. Sainthood does not exist under the sway of Animism and Polydaemonism; under Polytheism it has its prototypes, but the piety is that of the divided heart and its union with virtue is insecure; it dies out on the soil of Atheism; and it withers before the breath of those philosophical systems which admit of no real union and communion between the human and the divine. The two systems which have been most favourable to saintliness are Pantheism and Theism, and the fundamental types of sainthood are the pantheistic and the theistic, to which the Christian type has to be added as a special development and enrichment of the theistic species.

Pantheism and Theism have favoured and fostered saintliness in the two essential particulars that they have laid upon the mind a powerful constraint to see all things in God and think of all things in relation to God, and that they have similarly constrained the will to submit itself wholly to His disposal. But the differences are also as far-reaching as they are deep-seated between the piety of the theistic saints, with their faith in a God who is at once the Infinite Being and a personal Spirit, and who, while Creator and Governor of the world, has yet conceded to the world of men and finite things a relative independence; and the piety of the pantheistic saints for whom there is ‘one being and no second,’ and for whom the plenitude of the divine perfections tends to be replaced by the darkness and the void of an unknown and unknowable ground of the universe. This fundamental contrast in the conception of the religious object and of the religious relationship has also carried in its train a number of secondary contrasts—the most notable being that while theistic religion has been bound up with the promise and the endeavour after a positive salvation, which included fulness of life and victory over the world with the promise of eternal life, pantheistic sainthood has been closely associated with a pessimistic valuation even of the highest goods of finite existence, and has encouraged the belief that the best that could happen to the world would be that it should be emancipated from its unresting toil and feverish strife, and that best for the individual is that he should find repose in a dreamless sleep from which there would be no further awakening. Professor Heiler has contrasted mystical and prophetic religion as the chief types of sanctity. ‘Those two types of piety,’ he observes, ‘spring from the same psychological root, and are based in the last resort on the same ideal conception: they are at one in the pursuit of purity of life, love, and blessedness, and in their faith in a supreme, absolute, transcendent Being in whom their yearnings find satisfaction. But the religion which affirms and that which negates personality, the experience of God which leans on history and that which dispenses with history, revelation and ecstasy, prophetism and the way of the cloister, transformation of the world and flight from the world, evangelism and contemplation—these contrasts are tool tremendous to permit of the identification of the two types, which are rather to be distinguished as the two poles of the higher piety.’14 The distinction between mystical and prophetic religion is real and important and has been met with in both East and West; but on the whole it may be said that the synthesis of principles to which Heiler gives the name of mystical religion is that which Pantheism has normally effected, and that similarly his synthesis of the elements of prophetic religion is that which has usually been effected under the inspiration of the theistic faith. Whether the theistic or the pantheistic saint has been in the right in his theological presupposition is the supreme issue that emerges on a general view of the history of religion, and the only question which is of equal moment is whether the faith of either is well founded.

The ideal of saintliness was developed by Christianity into a richer combination of gracious elements—the fresh impulse being given by the addition to the theistic doctrine of the faith of the Incarnation. Jesus Christ, who was worshipped as God manifest in the flesh, and as uniting in His person the divine nature with the human, and who as the Son was knit to the Father by the bonds of a perfect love and by the service of a perfect obedience, represented the distinctive elements of sanctity in the highest conceivable degree. Jesus Christ was proposed as an example to His brethren, and from Him there went forth a virtue that created saints after His image. The general character of the mind of the saint, according to Thomas Aquinas, is that it habitually directs itself to God, and that not only in religious duties but in the whole range of life.15 The two special notes are munditia and firmitas. The thesis of Fénelon in a once famous book was that saintliness has as its characteristic and indispensable feature ‘love to God alone without any the least mixture of an interested motive either of fear or of hope’—a pure and disinterested love which would cling to God in gratitude and devotion even if He had not promised the gift of eternal life.16 The official pronouncement of the Roman Catholic Church presupposes orthodox faith and lays the stress on heroic virtue and endurance to the end. ‘For the canonisation of a servant of God,’ says Benedict xiv., ‘it suffices that it be proven that the person has practised in a pre-eminent and heroic degree the virtues which occasion offered him according to his condition, his rank and his personal estate.’ To this was added the requirement of signs accompanying. ‘As many as underwent martyrdom for Christ’s sake, and after their death became illustrious through signs or miracles; as many as after the laudable exercise of heroic virtues died a death which was precious in the sight of God, and after their death were resplendent with the glory of miracles—these are the objects of canonisation.’17 The treatment of sainthood in the older Protestant period was largely polemical—being directed against the practice of canonisation as a usurpation of the judicial rights of God, the alleged miracles of the lives of the saints, and above all against the adoration of the saints; but also as a matter of course Protestantism has venerated the higher degrees of sanctification, with which it has been familiar in the union with Christ and devotion to the will of God.

The essential elements of saintliness are close communion with God and assimilation to the like-ness of God. Emphasis has also been justly laid, as by Fénelon and James, on the eclipse of self and the joy of self-annihilating service. The types of religious experience which have been distinguished as finding the supreme good in obedience to God, and in the love of God, have been chiefly exemplified in the schools of the saints, and they also have contributed a certain proportion of the thinkers for whom the possession of light has been a large part, if not the essence, of the highest good that is won through union with God. But sainthood has represented the highest degree or perfection of all religious types, not exclusive preference for any one, and it would be unjust to rule out from the holy family those who have recognised the claims of the self in respect that they have rejoiced in their religion as a provision for the salvation of their own souls. It is quite true that no claim of sainthood could be made for any whose piety and virtue had their sole spring in the hope of escaping the torments of Hell and attaining the eternal joys of Heaven; but the essence of salvation has been understood by spiritual persons to consist in communion with God and in sanctification, and the attainment of these things may equally be described as the climax of self-realisation or of self-annihilation Certain it is that many who have been revered as among the greatest of the saints, including the greatest in the field of what has been called prophetic religion, have dwelt with adoring gratitude on the gift of salvation, and have put this in the forefront of their message to the world. Only, as Fénelon observed, they thought of God first and last, and could even think chiefly of their own salvation from the point of view that it redounded to the glory of God.

The saint who, in the ages of unquestioning faith, had been advanced to semi-divine honours, was brought down by the eighteenth-century Enlighten-ment to the low estate of a fanatic, and the medical science of last century threatened to degrade him to still lower estate of the neurotic and the epileptic. This work of profanation has practically ceased, and the saint has come near to being reinstated in his former dignity by a generation of seekers whose interest has been aroused in the intellectual equipment of the saint, and in the peculiar workings of the God-filled and God-intoxicated mind, and which has groaned under the burden and the bondage of its negations, or has grown contemptuous of itself and of its own poor stock of half-beliefs. There is a growing disposition to re-adopt the traditional view, that the class of the saints is entitled at the least to a co-ordinate rank with the other classes which the world has decided to call great. It is recognised that religious genius is a true form of genius, and that sanctity is a sublime kind of heroism. The saints may well be reckoned among the great ones of the earth, since their achievement has been one which men are generally agreed in thinking impossible—to overcome the forces of selfishness, sensuality and worldliness which are rooted so deeply in constitution of human nature, and to be filled with the spirit whose habit is to think and will in terms of God and of other selves. And what makes the achievement more impressive is that on the one hand it has not been dependent on special favouring circumstances of natural endowment, time and environment and that on the other, in contrast with the tendency of the intellectual powers to decay, saintliness tends to go from strength to strength, and to shine most brightly when infirmities multiply and the Kind of Terrors is at the door.18 The saints fall into two divisions—the humbler class whose greatness consisted in what they were, and the exalted class whose members had the additional elements of grandeur that they combined saintliness with lofty talent or genius, and that they have exercised a vast influence over mankind. The influence of the saints who may be called the spiritual masters—those who founded, re-formed or re-vitalised the spiritual and ethical religions of the world—is indeed one of the miracles of history. For while they had much reason to say of the common stuff of humanity, ‘My ways are not your ways, nor my thoughts your thoughts,’ and while at their appearing men ignored them, then mocked them, and proceeded to stone or to crucify them, the via dolorosa proved to be the way to a throne, and they became dictators to nations and races in the matter of what they were to believe concerning God and their own destiny, and the duties which God requires of man. This which holds of prophets and apostles in general has been made a commonplace for the western world in the story of Jesus Christ. And at least part of the explanation is that sainthood, when the first surprise has been overcome, compels the recognition by man of that which the witness of his soul acknowledges as the manifestation of a realm of divine holiness and beauty which towers high above his commonplace world.

II

Social Psychology has drawn attention to various groups, and classified them on different principles. Dr. M’Dougall distinguishes three main classes—the fortuitous and ephemeral, the natural and the artificial. The fortuitous is represented by the crowd which gathers in a street to watch a house on fire. The natural group is of two kinds—that which, like the family, is rooted in kinship, and that which, like the population of an island, is geographically determined. The artificial groups are of three classes—the purposive, illustrated by the social club and the philanthropic association; the traditional, illustrated by the Hindu caste-system; and the mixed, which is determined by tradition, but is also marked by conscious purpose as well as by a lively self-consciousness. The mixed form, we are told, has its greatest example in the Christian Church.19 Dr. Drever has proposed an alternative classification based on the distinctive character of the mental attitude assumed by the various groups. The psychological criterion, Be finds, yields three main types—the crowd, which has its bond of unity in the perception of some object or event that attracts its interest; the club, which is constituted for the furtherance of some definite purpose; and the community, which possesses continuous mental life, pursues common ends, and makes a provision for promoting the self-realisation of its members. The nation has passed through the perceptive stage when it was technically a crowd, the ideational stage at which it had the limited outlook and programme of a club, and as it has developed in civilised form it has risen to the rational level the many-sided community. The notes which are ascribed to the highest type of social group are continuity of existence, group self-consciousness, interaction with other groups, and group-organisation.20 This list of notes might have been collected from an examination of the history and life of the Christian Church, and the only considerable addition which would fall to be made is that it the Church has been irresistibly impelled to give expression to its self consciousness in creeds and confessions, and that has proposed to its members an end so comprehensive as to include the blessings of eternity along with a partial realisation in time of a Kingdom of God.

The social group behaves as if it were a distinct individual, with a character that is other than the sum or the average of the qualities of its component members, and also with well-marked habitudes of thought, feeling, and action. It has therefore become a popular usage to speak of the soul or spirit a nation; and serious thinkers have maintained that the group possesses a collective mind which, while rooted in some real fashion in the particular minds its component members, does thinking and willing of an independent kind, and is able to make its ideas and its aims effectively known by way of inspiration or suggestion. Wundt, however, guards himself against being supposed to teach that there is in the background a mind which is other than the sum of the interacting individual minds. ‘There is no sufficient evidence,’ says Professor Alexander,’ that such a mind exists. It is a short symbol for that co-operation and conflict of many minds which produces standards of approval and disapproval.’21 Dr. M’Dougall adduces impressive arguments in support of the other view, and, though he decides against it, he qualifies his rejection of the collective hypothesis as provisional.22 The un-willingness to concede the existence of a collective mind somewhat surprising, since from the empirical point view mind or soul is merely a convenient name for a system of psychical occurrences, and it might be thought that the larger system of the group has as good a claim as the smaller system which we call a human being to the benefit of the term.

Some groups are held to be inferior, some superior to their individual components. The inferiority is marked in the case of the crowd, which merely owes its unity to an immediate concrete interest. In many respects it is more of a child than a man; it is swayed by its feelings; it is influenced by suggestion more than by argument; it laughs at very elemental forms of wit and humour; it is fickle, though disposed to welcome decisive action; it is very impatient of unpalatable truth; its sympathies are easily touched, when it is capable of great generosity and even self-sacrifice, and on the other hand, its mind is readily swept by gusts of fear and wrath, when it will hardly shrink from any form of injustice and cruelty.23 It can, however, be added that, except when strongly moved by passion or self-interest, the deliberating crowd can commonly be depended on for a majority-finding which is marked by good sense, and also pays respect to the principle of fair dealing. The group which is technically defined as the club often serves for the intellectual stimulus and enlightenment of its members but as its aim may be limited to the pursuit of some form of recreation, or of pecuniary profit, its influence is to narrow the moral outlook and to commend the maxim that self-interest is the proper criterion of action. The community is decidedly the intellectual superior of its ordinary members. It would be absurd to say that the average man or woman has, an opinion which is of the slightest value upon the great political and economic issues which may be submitted to a democratic electorate, but it is not necessary to despair of a system that has given so much power to ignorant and incompetent individuals, as there is ground for supposing that the collective mind in some way takes a grasp of a grave situation, and in any case responds to good leadership The collective mind also seems to realise keenly the necessity of making provision through education and otherwise for transmitting its accumulated knowledge and wisdom from generation to generation, and so far as possible making them common property The moral superiority of the community has been thought to be more doubtful. Nations, it is observed, are determined by considerations of self-interest to a degree which the good man would be ashamed to imitate even amid the stress and the temptations of competitive business, and the religious community has been much upbraided with taking as the habitual principle of corporate action the defence and advancement of its special ecclesiastical interests. On the other hand, it is undeniable that the spirit of a nation has often recalled its citizens from the selfish pursuit of profit, pleasure and ease, and has not only taught them to appreciate ideals, but has evoked a mighty volume of unpaid labours and of uncompensated sacrifices in the maintenance of ideal causes. The Church habitually fulfils the invaluable ethical function of making familiar to the everyday world the Standards of a moral order in which there is a revision or a reversal of worldly values, and in which manifold enterprises are carried out for the simple reason that they are required by duty, or prompted by the love of man. The attitude of the social groups towards religion has naturally varied widely in accordance with the narrower or wider range of the aims which they proposed to themselves. The ‘crowd’ type, in view of its temporary character, and the ‘club’ type, in view of its limited purpose, have usually treated religion as an irrelevant concern. The community, on the other hand, has constituted itself the custodian and guardian of religious interests. This office has often been undertaken by the nation, and it has been the chief function of the religious community or Church. And both have relied much on the family, whose contribution amply merits a separate study.

1. The natural group, as represented by the tribe, dominates religion on the plane of the lower culture. It was also the most influential religious subject at the stage of developed Polytheism, which bore the impress of the collective mind of a nation equally with its language and its Art. With the appearance of the great religions the nations came under the domination of prophetic personalities, and of the beliefs and practices which were supported by their authority, but the natural group still reserved the right to value, and to some extent to revise, a higher religion from its own point of view. The nation has a capacity for recognising the highest when it is flashed upon it in its native splendour, but its deep-seated bent is to take counsel and devise means for preserving and augmenting its own earthly well-being. And the nation has largely valued and administered religion in this self-regarding interest. Its working criterion of the worth of a religion has been its actual or supposed serviceableness to the State, and in enforcing this principle it has had a considerable hand in shaping the events of religious history. Amenhotep IV. was an early apostle of ethical Monotheism, and in the first instance it would appear that Egypt was with him, but a reaction followed which was partly due to the fact that the interests of the priesthood had suffered, but still more to the fact that after the reformation, and, as it must have seemed to the general mind, because of an apostasy, provinces were lost to the empire and Egypt fell into confusion. The ever-recurring backslidings of the children of Israeli when they went after the Baalim and the Ashtaroth, are partly explained by the circumstance that the heathen divinities lowered the demands of the moral code and allowed the worshippers their fill of licence and laughter, but the weightier reason doubtless was that they were supposed to have more understanding of agriculture than the God of battles, and in any case could be depended on, as Jahveh could not, to say, ‘my country right or wrong.’ If Roman emperors persecuted the Church and thereafter established it, it was mainly on the strength of the diverse judgments which they formed as to whether Christianity was injurious or profitable to the commonwealth. When in the fifth century of our era the Roman Empire was overthrown and dissolved by the northern barbarian hordes, the Italian mind was disposed to think that a mistake had been made by Rome in renouncing her ancient gods, and there was a tendency to revert to paganism as giving a better pledge of security. The medieval rulers, in giving the Church a civil establishment, were influenced by the belief that Christ and the saints had a hand in victories and defeats, but probably still more by the consideration that the Christian religion supported the cause of law and order, and that the Church was the great school for the inculcation of the cardinal virtues which are of vital importance to the home and the State. Since the French Revolution the modern States have increasingly disclaimed any interest in religion, and any responsibility for its maintenance, and the material support which was formerly given to the Church has been transferred, with ever-increasing liberality, to the support of education and public health, and of the works of secular philanthropy. In friendly justification of the change of attitude it could be said that modern Societies are hopelessly divided in religious opinions, or again that religion has shown itself to be entirely Capable of evoking its own means of support, but probably the deepest reason was that the civil magistrate no longer felt the same confidence as of old that religion makes a palpable contribution to the safety and the material well-being of the commonwealth. In the Middle Ages it was a convincing argument for a nation becoming Christian that it thereby entered the pale of civilisation, while modern States attach much less importance to a profession of Christianity as evidence of a civilised status than to the development of a powerful army or a first-class fleet. At the same time it remains the general conviction of the representatives of the cultivated Western mind that the Church deserves profound respect as a nursery of morality.

2. The ecclesiastical community, in the nature of the case, has filled a more important role, especially in Christian times, as a religious subject. It shares the self-regarding instinct, but, since a Church reckons among its interests the successful discharge of a spiritual and humanitarian vocation, the religious community naturally lives and moves on a higher ethical plane than the nation. When it is accused of self-seeking in the matter of the worldly goods of wealth, power and honour, it may be said that, even when the charge was supported by good evidence, it was an extenuating circumstance that it was believed that the best thing that could happen to a nation was that the Church should be strengthened for its spiritual mission by the possession of additional talents which increased its power over the world and commanded its regard. The collective mind of the religious community has served as its organ of self-expression and self-affirmation in three principal ways—by formulating its beliefs in creeds and confessions, by ordering its worship, and by organising the various forms of service, missionary and philanthropic, which were dictated by its programme of service to God and man. In its defensive measures it has shown much passion—engaging in polemics with proverbial heat, and readily resorting to violence, but it is very intelligible that toleration did not soon or easily commend itself to a spiritual society which held truth to be the food of souls and heresy to be deadly poison. In administering its trust the religious community has naturally felt itself to have an authority in spiritual matters which was paramount over that of the natural community, and has claimed autonomy or freedom; and this claim, which in former times was the source of bitter conflicts with the political community, which equally asserted its competence in the field, has been generally conceded since the State came to think that it could not derive much profit from interfering in religious matters, or suffer much harm from leaving them alone. The collective mind of the religious society has also been the zealous custodian of the sacred deposit, dwelling with affectionate piety on the memories of the golden ages of the beginnings and the revivals, and rejoicing in the glories of their miraculous setting. It was on its initiative that collections of sacred literature were formed, and by its judgment that books were given the canonical stamp. It has besides found infinite joy in embellishing the ecclesiastical heritage, on the one hand by giving play to its imagination in legend, poetry and picture, on the other by rearing fabrics with characters of matchless grandeur and beauty, which, in conjunction with solemn and stately rites, could not only suggest but to some extent body forth the beauties and the solemnities of a heavenly world.

The contemporary schools of Religious Psychology are mainly distinguished by the preference which they have shown for one or other of the above-named varieties of the religious subject. The member of our list that has been least favoured is man as man—though it may be said that the omission has been so far repaired by the anthropologists, whose laborious researches in the realm of primitive culture were in part inspired by the belief that in the savage we have the clearest view of the fundamental and permanent elements of human nature. The American School, as we have seen, pitched upon the convert as the most interesting and instructive figure of the religious sphere. Workers of different nationalities have reinvestigated by preference the equipment and the experience of the saints. The German School of Wundt and the French School of Durkheim, following the lead of the English anthropological school, have magnified the importance of the social group in the origination and the development of religion. Nor does this exhaust the list of preferences. The French investigators gave most attention, in the first stage of their inquest, to the pathological subject, while in Britain and America a special study has been made of the religion of the child. And it is obvious that each of these subjects is important, that the fullest examination of the characteristics of each is called for, and that each has a contribution of which some use will be made in the perfected system of the Psychology of Religion. But there will still remain a question as to which subject is to be regarded as most important, and as having a title to be in some sense normative for religious life and thought.

In the individual series there can be no doubt that the order of the ascending scale is the human being, the convert and the saint. Starbuck was right in diverting attention from the human being as such to the converted or regenerated man. But also the later workers were in the right who have maintained that unheroic modem examples of Christians and half-Christians are much less worth examining than the great figures of religious history, and that much richer sources than those which are tapped even by a satisfactory questionnaire are available in the confessions and the testimonies of the saints, and in the sacred books of the higher religions. It may be thought that there should be little hesitation in deciding whether greater importance attaches to the natural community of the tribe or nation, or to the so-called artificial group of the religious community. The natural group, especially in the form of the primitive tribe, has a special interest for a generation which has been impelled by the evolutionary doctrine to speculations on the problems of origin, but it can only be a passing fashion that the student of religion should devote his attention to the lower rather than to the higher levels of spiritual aspiration and achievement, and find matter more attractive and valuable in the ideas and practices of the Australian aborigines and the Andaman Islanders than in the Indian philosophical schools and in the doctrinal systems of the Scholastics, the Reformers and the Puritans, not to speak of the Creeds and Confessions in which the Church defined its faith.

The final question is whether precedence is to be given to the saint as the supreme individual subject, or to the religious community as the highest form of the collective subject. In the great religions these have been the formative and guiding factors, and the history of religion, in many of its most interesting chapters, is the history of their conflicts. The antithesis between the original deposit of faith and its interpretation by the collective mind of a school has been a constant feature of the religion of India. Islam has the Sunni Sect, which accepts the Sunnah or traditional law as having concurrent authority with the Koran, the Shias, with their special body of traditions, and the Wahabis, whose object was ‘to sweep away all later innovations, and to return to the original purity of Islam, as based upon the exact teaching of the Koran, and the example of Mahomet.’24 Israel had the writings of the prophets for its inspiration, and for its theology and the practical guidance of life it had the instruction of the Rabbinical schools. The Christian Church was rent in twain in the sixteenth century over the question as to whether the standard of faith and morals is a self-interpreting Bible containing the teachings of Christ and His apostles, or an ecclesiastical interpretation of Scripture and an oral tradition which have been entrusted to the accredited organ of the infallible Church. On the issue which has thus been debated in a worldwide and persistent controversy the natural verdict is that the saintly prophetic personality stands above the religious community. For the ideal Church, formerly called the invisible Church, it is hardly possible to make too great claims. But the empirical or visible Church has grave limitations. It has a rich endowment of reverence and devotion, it has laboured unweariedly in the development and the defence of the truths committed to its trust, it has given much evidence of practical sense in its efforts to bring its message and its principles into effective relation with human souls and the general life of humanity, and it has done missionary and philanthropic work for the world in the spirit of Christ which ranks as one of the great moral achievements of the race; but it does not lie in its vocation to rival on the intellectual side the intuitions of the prophet, any more than it has been given it to reproduce in its character and spirit, without much earthly alloy, the holiness of the saint.

• 1.

  Einführung in die Religionspsychologie, 1917, p. 4.

• 2.

  G. Steven, The Psychology of the Christian Soul, 1911; H. R. Mackintosh, Aspects of Christian Belief, 1923, ch. x.

• 3.

  ‘The common element in all pious states, and consequently the essence of piety, is that we feel ourselves absolutely dependent, to wit, dependent on God.’ Der christliche Glaube, 1821, i. p. 33. So the Reden über die Religion, passim.

• 4.

  ‘I call it Kreaturgefühl—the feeling of the creature that sinks to earth in its nothingness, and fades away in presence of that which is above all creatures.’ Das Heilige,¹⁰, 1923, pp. 10 ff. The ‘otherness’ of the sacred is also emphasised by Durkheim. ‘There is nothing left with which to characterise the sacred in relation to the profane except their heterogeneity.’ The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Eng. tr.), 1915, p. 381.

• 5.

  Op. cit., p. 39.

• 6.

  E. D. Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion, 1899. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902. G. A. Coe, The Psychology of Religion, 1916.

• 7.

  The Psychology of Religion, p. 52.

• 8.

  Op. cit., p. 94.

• 9.

  The Philosophy of Religion (Eng. tr.), 1906, pp. 119 ff.

• 10.

  The Psychology of Religion, 1921, p. 153.

• 11.

  G. F. Moore, History of Religion, 1914, p. 337.

• 12.

  The Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics contains studies of ‘Saints and Martyrs’ by different hands in ten fields, Buddhist, Chinese, Christian, Iranian, Japanese, Jewish, Mohammedan, Semitic and Egyptian, and Syrian. ‘Art.’ vol. xi.

• 13.

  Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 272, 273.

• 14.

  Das Gebet,⁴, 1921, p. 283.

• 15.

  Summa Theologica. ii. 2, q. 81. 8.

• 16.

  Maxims of the Saints (Eng. tr.), 1698, pp. 7, 8.

• 17.

  Opera. 1839; De Servorum Dei Beatificatione, i. 14, iii. 21.

• 18.

  Joly, Psychologie des Saints, 1920, chap. i.

• 19.

  The Group Mind, 1921, p. 92.

• 20.

  The Psychology of Education, 1922, chap, xi., ‘The Social Group.’

• 21.

  Space, Time, and Deity, ii. p. 221.

• 22.

  The Group Mind, p. 39.

• 23.

  Le Bon, Psychologie des Foules,⁹, 1905; Flugge, ‘Die Psychologie der Massen,’ Preuss. Jahrbücher, March 1921.

• 24.

  Stobart, Islam and its Founder, 1901, pp. 197 ff.