I cannot too strongly insist that all this is extremely instructive. It explains so many things that still have to be explained, if religion be untrue. The new science of psychology has already accounted for many abnormal phenomena that were formerly considered miraculous—“faith cures,”[45] for instance. Does it not account for the effects of prayer? We know nothing of the efficacy of prayer in securing material benefits—there is no proof either way; but we do know that it has often an ethical value, and is also a means of strengthening faith. Does it necessarily follow that a Supernatural Being hears and answers the suppliant’s prayers? I think not. Suggestion, it is now known, exercises an extraordinary influence over the subjective mind. In prayer auto-suggestion undoubtedly plays its subtle rôle.
Let me give an example of the benign results that may be effected by suggestion without any appeal to the supernatural. Often a moral change for the worse in a most estimable person is distinctly traceable to causes over which he or she had no control, and the physician or surgeon, having diagnosed the case, proceeds to do his best to bring about a cure. Where it is some nervous malady, mental therapeutics or psychic healing is sometimes extremely efficacious.[46] Vices and weaknesses are now looked upon by many in the light of diseases and ailments—curable, ameliorable, or incurable, as the case may be. Disease or Devil, the fact remains that medical treatment may effect a cure even where the patient’s disorder has been brought on by, as we say, his own fault. Dipsomania, morphinomania, kleptomania, nymphomania, satyriasis, and various moral perversions may yield to a purely natural treatment, whether it be the method of a Milne Bramwell (by suggestion) or of Keeley.
When denouncing Mariolatry (in his sermon at the opening of the Church Congress, October, 1905), the Bishop of London said: “It is not revealed that the cry to any saint or to the Virgin Mary ever reaches them at all.” Apparently, therefore, the Bishop admits that appeals to the supernatural may be wasted, and this in spite of the suppliant being very much in earnest. Yet who would be prepared to say that the Roman Catholic who prays to the Virgin Mary and to innumerable saints does not derive quite as much benefit from the process as the Protestant who directs his worship solely to the Holy Trinity, or the Shintoist who invokes the benign spirits of his ancestors?[47] The effect of the suggestion is the same in each case, and has all the appearance of an answer to prayer.
Again, putting aside abnormal phases of the mind, is it not, as Ralph Waldo Trine puts it (in his little book, Character Building: Thought Power), a simple psychological law that any type of thought, if entertained for a sufficient length of time, will, by and by, reach the motor tracts of the brain, and finally burst forth into action? There seems no need for the introduction of a supernatural hypothesis to explain the moral effect of prayer. So, also, with regard to faith, it is only natural that the believer, racked with doubt, should find reassurance in prayer.
The Theist who lays store by the evidence from “religious experience” will do well to ponder over the following words of one of Professor James’s critics: “Instead of producing anything that would strengthen the belief in extra-human spirit agents influencing human destinies, psychology has made intelligible, conformably to the rest of our organised knowledge, most, if not all, of the striking phenomena which have been the empirical props of the popular faith in spiritism, whether Christian or not. We refer to anæsthesias, analgesias, hallucinations, monitions, trances, the sense of illumination in ecstasy, etc., including the facts considered in Professor James’ lectures. In making this statement, I do not forget the work of the Society for Psychical Research. Its achievements may be declared to have been so far, and without prejudice of the future, absolutely inconclusive with regard to spiritism.”[48] In other words, psychical research, if conducted by the experimental method and without bias, may be pregnant with consequences hardly in accord with the hopes of either the spiritist or spiritualist (in its religious sense). For, should abnormal phenomena of all kinds admit of a natural explanation, their present obscurity will no longer furnish grounds for supernatural speculation.
THE RELIGIOUS (?) EXPERIENCES OF INTOXICATION.
According to Professor James’s theory, it is the person who chances to have a well-developed subliminal life who is predestined to be saved, for then God will be able to reach him. As Professor James informs us that “nitrous oxide and ether, especially nitrous oxide, when sufficiently diluted with air, stimulate the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree,” so that “depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler,” the unbelieving Philistine ought to be recommended to inhale this truth-revealing, and therefore faith-producing, gas. Like music, it must be meant as an aid to worship. The new beatitude will then be, as Mr. Leuba remarks, “Blessed are the intoxicated, for to them the kingdom of spirits is revealed!” I can quite understand the interest aroused by Professor James’s remarkable book; but that Theists and would-be Theists should take its chief conclusion seriously is beyond me—or, rather, I should say it is one more proof to me that the inherited capacity for superstition is still strong within us. We can understand why supernatural beliefs die hard.
MUSIC AND THE EMOTIONS.[49]
Are our emotions reliable guides, or are they not? Though the motive-power in our nature, though they go to make up that heart upon which Mr. Fielding so eloquently discourses in his Hearts of Men, do they not need to be carefully controlled by reason? Are they not the very same emotions which, in all but religious matters, are admittedly a fruitful source of self-deception? Take the emotion excited by music. I know many good people who think they possess considerable religious feeling, and have had a religious experience, because they are peculiarly affected by music, and especially by fine sacred music.[50] Similarly, Dr. Torrey’s “Glory Song” appeals to the untrained ear of his emotional audiences, and the Salvation band, all out of tune, elevates the soul of the Salvationist. Yet lower down the scale of musical culture we find a clash of discordant sounds exciting the religious emotions of the savage. Is it too much to say that these “experiences” differ only in degree from those of the dog who howls as certain notes affect him? Granted that music, suited to the taste of the worshipper, is an aid to worship, we have to remember that there are those whose temperaments are so constituted that they are more or less unaffected by music—good, bad, or indifferent—and, if the religious feeling evoked be from God, may we not ask in all reverence: “Why should the unmusical be debarred from this means of feeling His presence? Why should the man without a note of music in his composition have this much less chance of eternal salvation?” Surely we are not to take seriously and literally the words of our great philosopher-poet when he says: “Let no such man be trusted”?