Starbuck emphasizes the surrender of the will in conversion even when the will has been consciously exercised. "We are confronted with the paradox ... that in the same persons who strive towards the higher life, self-surrender is often necessary before the sense of assurance comes. The personal will must be given up. In many cases relief persistently refuses to come until the person ceases to resist, or to make an effort in the direction he desires to go."[114] He adds that "faith is the next step after self-surrender, or even the accompaniment of it.... Then faith comes in, which means that the soul is in a receptive attitude.... One throws oneself completely on the world-will, so that one may become a 'receiver of its truth and an organ of its activity.'"[115]
Royce remarks that our religious need is supreme, and "is accompanied with the perfectly well-warranted assurance that we cannot attain the goal unless we can get into some sort of communion with a real life infinitely richer than our own.... The religious ideal grows out of the vision of a spiritual freedom and peace which are not naturally ours."[116] "The little will of the conscious and limited individual," says J. B. Pratt, "must simply give up before the deeper will of the larger personality, stretching out from the conscious centre no one knows how far, can take control."[117]
It is clear that the evangelical scheme of salvation, "Heaven's easy, artless, unencumber'd plan," has found strong and unexpected support from the modern study of religious experience. The impressive testimonies above, if translated into Pauline language, mean that salvation is by faith and not by works of the law. The examples from which the generalizations are made are taken mostly from orthodox circles, but even those who are but loosely attached to Christianity in its usual forms are saved in the same way. Thus James says of the mind-curers that "they have demonstrated that a form of regeneration by relaxing, by letting go, psychologically indistinguishable from the Lutheran justification by faith and the Wesleyan acceptance of free grace, is within the reach of persons who have no conviction of sin and care nothing for the Lutheran theology."[118] The theologian might contend that Christianity is a sort of "sleeping partner" in these schemes, and that they contain the mustard seed of faith sufficient to save; but, however this may be, the fact remains that the mind-cure schemes teach a form of salvation by faith, not by works.
The strain of attention and constant anxiety, involved in the effort to keep the law and save oneself, leads to exhaustion and despair. The struggle is hopeless, the psychologist would say, because the nervous centres become exhausted. Man cannot, however zealous for the law, by conscious activity and moral struggle attain inward peace. Salvation by works is psychologically as well as theologically impossible.
II. Metaphysical Implicates of Religious Experience
The students of religious experience are to a remarkable degree in agreement with one another and with the teachings of evangelical Christianity in their view of the place and power of religion in human life, and of the need of salvation and the way of salvation. Disagreements arise when they seek no longer to describe religious experience but to interpret that experience. Our authorities, in technical language, agree very largely when they study the phenomenology of religion, but differ widely as to its metaphysical implicates.
It may properly be asked whether the psychology of religion, while dealing with the deep things of man, is competent to reveal the deep things of God. Should the psychologist venture to draw any inferences in the metaphysical sphere? Strictly speaking he is studying only subjective phenomena, and the self-imposed limitations of his subject should forbid him from launching into metaphysical speculation. If he cannot, as a psychologist, call his soul his own, much less can he infer that God exists or that Christianity is true. He must remain, perforce, in the outer courts of the temple, and cannot enter the inner shrine.
As a matter of fact no writer on the psychology of religious experience really confines himself within strictly empirical limits. Metaphysical inferences are in fact drawn, or very plainly suggested, and the important question becomes what inferences of this nature, whether positive or negative, are proper and legitimate. Religious experience is at any rate not self-explanatory, but points to something beyond itself, whether that something be merely a disordered nervous system, or a natural impulse such as that of sex, or a department of consciousness outside of the normal, or a Great Beyond, whether conceived as Humanity or as the living God. We may consider then, (1) the physical explanation of religion, including the sexual; (2) the psychological explanation; (3) the social explanation; and (4) the theological explanation.
1. Lowest in the scale is the view of religion which regards it as the result of abnormal physical or psychophysical conditions. This theory is the expression of a robust secularism, which can quote the proverb, "When the devil was sick, the devil a monk would be," and would prescribe a dose of physic (as his friends did for George Fox) for those in distress on account of their sins. "For the modern materialist, as for the ancient Manichee, sin is a question of physiology; moral depravity only a manifestation of corporeal disorder."[119] Religion and crime, in this view, both depart from the line of normal existence, and are pathological phenomena. But if religion is a disease, it afflicts men in all sorts of physical and mental states, and is practically a universal disease, taking the world at large.
Akin to this pathological explanation of religion is that which sees in it either a natural expression, or else a perversion, of the sexual instinct. "In a certain sense the religious life is an irradiation of the reproductive instinct,"[120] says Starbuck; and G. S. Hall says that "in its most fundamental aspect, conversion is a natural, normal, universal, and necessary process at the stage when life pivots over from an autocentric to a heterocentric basis."[121] This view is popular with those who would give a naturalistic account of the religious life, especially of conversion.